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The Early American Spirit, 



THE GENESIS OF IT. 






THE 



Declaration of Independence, 



THE effects of IT. 



BY 

/ 

RICHARD S. STORRS, g.D., LL.D. 



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Of WASH! 



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NEW YORK ; 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH &- COMPANY, 



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COrVKlGIlT, 1878, BV 

Anson D. F. ILvndolph & Company. 



LARGE PAPER EDITION. 
ISO Copies Priiiit-ci. 

NO. .v.*.L; 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 



The following Addresses have been previously published 
in separate pamphlets ; but the edition of each being ex- 
hausted, and a desire having been expressed that the two 
should be combined in a volume, the publishers now pre- 
sent them in this form to the public. 

The first of these Addresses was delivered before the 
New York Historical Society, on the occasion of the cele- ^ti 

bration of its Seventieth Anniversary, April 15, 1875. 

The second was delivered before the citizens of New 
York, in accordance with the invitation of their distin- 
guished committee, at the celebration of the Centennial 
Anniversary of American Independence, July 4, 1876. 

The favor with which the Addresses were received by 
the large and cultivated audiences convened on these 
respective occasions, at the Academy of Music, and the 
acceptance which they have since met with from the public, 
as presenting in brief compass a lucid and just exhibition 
of the earlier and the later life and progress of the Ameri- 
can people, have induced the publishers to embody them 
in this more permanent form, for their wider circulation, 
and the easier preservation of them by those into whose 
hands they come. 



THE EARLY AMERICAN SPIRIT, AND 
THE GENESIS OF IT. 



ADDRESS. 



Mr. President: Members of the Historical 

Society: Ladies, and Gentlemen: 

The anniversary by which we are assembled marks 
the completion of the seventieth year of the useful 
life of this Society. It is an occasion of interest to all 
of us, if regarded only in this relation. There are 
some present who remember still the founders of the 
Society: Egbert Benson, its first President, John 
Pintard, Brockholst Livingston, Dr. John M. Mason, 
Drs. Samuel L. Mitchill and David Hosack, Rufus 
King, Samuel Bayard, Daniel D. Tompkins, DeWitt 
Clinton, and others whose names are less familiar. 
There are many present to whom are recalled memor- 
able faces, by the names of those who in subsequent 
years received its honors, or shared its labors, who are 
not now among the living: John Jay, Albert Gallatin, 
John Duer, Dr. McVickar, Gulian Verplanck, Charles 
King, Dr. John W. Francis, William L. Stone, 
Edward Robinson, Luther Bradish, Romeyn Brod- 
head. Dr. De Witt. 

All of us, who are of a studious habit, have enjoyed 
the labors and the influence of the Society, and have 



Address, 

been encouraged and quickened by it, as well as more 
directly aided, in the small excursions which we have 
made into the domain of historical knowledge. 

It is a source, therefore, I am sure, of unfeigned 
satisfaction to all of us to be able this evening to 
congratulate the honored President of the Society, 
its officers, and its members, on the success which it 
has accomplished, and on the promise of increasing 
prosperity with which its future here salutes us. In 
its incorporeal and continuing life, it has the dignity 
of age, without its decays. Its seventy years have 
brought larger fame, ampler resources, wider responsi- 
bilities ; but it has still the privilege of youth — the 
fair and far outlook of existence in its prime. It pro- 
jects our thoughts, from this eminent anniversary 
over the periods which it anticipates, as well as over 
that which it reviews ; and we shall joyfully unite in 
the hope that its coming career may be only more full 
of gladness and growth than has been its past, and 
that its influence may constantly extend, as the years 
augment its possessions and its fame. 

Such institutions are beneficent powers in civiliza- 
tion. Whatever transports us from the present to the 
past, from the near to the remote, widens the mind as 
well as instructs it ; makes it capacious, and reflective ; 
sets it free, in a relative independence of local impulse 
and of transient agitation ; gives it, in a measure, a char- 
acter cosmopolitan, and a culture universal. Whatever 
recalls to us eminent persons — their brifliant and 



Usefuhiess of such Societies, 

engaging parts, above all, their fortitude, wisdom, self- 
sacrifice — re-enforces our manhood, encourages our vir- 
tue, and makes us ashamed of our indolent self- 
indulgence, of our impatient and fitful habit. 

A community like ours — restless, changeful, abound- 
ing in wealth, vehemently self-confident — especially 
needs such inspiring impressions from a more austere 
and temperate past. A Society which presents that, 
through libraries and lectures, is ethical, educational, 
and not merely ornamental. In larger proportions, 
with more copious ministry, it fulfils the office of the 
statue of Erasmus, standing always, with a book in 
its hand, in the market-place of Rotterdam, amid the 
intricate network of canals, and in the incessant roar 
of traffic. It materializes again the shadowy forms. 
It breathes upon communities, languid or luxurious, 
an ennobling force, from vanished actions and silent 
lips. Presenting, as to immediate vision, the patient 
and achieving years into whose conquests we have 
entered, it makes us aware of the duty which always 
matches our privilege, and of the judgment which 
coming time will strictly pronounce upon our era. It 
ministers to whatever most aspires in man, to what- 
ever is worthiest in civilization. And so it concerns 
the public welfare that this Society should long fulfill 
its important office, while the city expands to widei 
splendor, and the years fly on with accelerating haste ; 
that this anniversary should be one in a series, stretch- 
ing forward beyond our life, beyond the life of those 



Address. 

who succeed us, while the countiy continues the in- 
viting and affluent home of men. 

But this anniversary is not the only one to which 
our thoughts are to-night directed. By the irresistible 
progress of time, we are set face to face with others 
which are at once to occur, the succession of which, 
during several years, is to make large claim upon our 
attention ; and these are anniversaries, in comparison 
with whose significance, and whose secular importance, 
the one which assembles us would lose its dignity if 
it were not itself associated with them. 

* History can but picture events; setting forth, in a 
measure, their causes and consequences, and indicating 
the varieties of action and of character which were in- 
volved in them. It is, as has been said, " the biog- 

i^raphy of communities." These Societies which pro- 
mote historical studies have it for their function to 
collect the materials, cultivate the tastes, assist the 
ininute and complex investigations, out of which 
comes the ultimate enlightening historical narrative. 
Their office is therefore subordinate and auxiliary, 
though quickening and fine. The office of the his- 
torians whom they instruct, is commemorative only, 
not creative. They are the heralds who marshal the 
procession, not the princely figures who walk in it. 
They exhibit actions which they did not perform, and 
describe events in producing which they had no part. 
When, then, the events themselves are before us, 
the mere narrative of which the student writes and the 

6 



Another Anniversary. 

library assists, our chief attention is challenged by 
them. Contemplating them, we lose sight, compara- 
tively, of the instruments which had made their out- 
line familiar, forgetting the processes before the 
vitality and the mass of the facts to which these 
had brought us. It is with us as with the traveler, 
who ceases to remember the ship which carried him 
across the seas, when he treads the streets of the dis- 
tant town, watches its unfamiliar manners, hears the 
dissonance of its strange speech, and looks with a sur- 
prised delight on its religious or civil architecture. 
So we, in front of the great events, the signal actions, 
the mean or the illustrious characters, to which the 
historical narrative has borne us, forget for the time the 
narrative itself, or only remember the intellectual grace 
which moulded its lines, the strength of proof which 
confirmed its conclusions, the buoyant movement with 
which it bore us across intervening floods of time. 

We stand, as a people, in the presence of a com- 
manding Past, and shall continue so to do in succeed- 
ing years of our national experience. One centennial 
anniversary, dear to the thoughts of every lover of 
English eloquence and American liberty, has passed 
already ; and you will pardon me, perhaps, if I pause 
upon that, because it has suggested the theme on 
which I would offer some remarks. 

It was just one hundred years ago, on the twenty- 
second of March last, that Edmund Burke delivered 
in the British Parliament that speech on " Concilia- 



Address. 

tion with the Colonies," which, of itself, would have 
assured the fame of any speaker. The profoundest 
political and legislative wisdom was presented in it 
with perspicuous clearness, and enforced with an elo- 
quence which Burke himself never surpassed. In 
eager and majestic utterance, he recited the circum- 
stances which had led him to seek, with impassioned 
ardor, to promote the reconciliation of the colonies 
to the Government of Great Britain ; and to do this 
by repealing the acts of Parliament against which re- 
sistance had here been aroused, and by adjusting 
future legislation on the plan of getting an American 
revenue, as England had got its American empire, by 
securing to the colonies the ancient and inestimable 
English privileges. 

The speech is, of course, familiar to you ; yet a rap- 
id indication of its compact and coercive argument 
may serve, perhaps, to revive it in your thoughts, as a 
couplet sometimes recalls a poem, as the touch of 
even an unskilful crayon may set before us the wide 
outreach of a landscape. 

The circumstance to which he first referred, was the 
rapid increase of the colonial pojDulation ; an increase 
so swift, and so continuing,' that, in his own words, 
" state the numbers as high as we will, whilst the dis- 
pute continues, the exaggeration ends. . . . Your 
children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood, 
than they [of the colonies] spread from families to 
communities, and from villages to nations." 



The Oration of Burke. 

The second circumstance which impressed his mind, 
was the con imer ce of the colonies : " out of all pro- 
portion, beyond the numbers of the people ; " in re- 
spect to which " fiction lags after truth ; invention is 
unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren." Of their 
expanding agriculture, he said : " For some time past 
the Old World has been fed from the New. The 
scarcity which you have felt would have been a deso- 
lating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true 
filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full 
breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its 
exhausted parent." Of the fisheries of the colonies, 
especially of the whale-fishery, he spoke in words 
whose fame is co-extensive with the English tongue, 
as carried to an extent beyond that reached by " the 
perseverance of Holland, the activity of France, or the 
dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ;" 
and this by a people " who are still, as it were, but in 
the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of 
manhood." 

Still more important, however, before his view than 
either the increasing population of the colonies, their 
agriculture, or their commerce, was the temper and 
character of the peop le who composed them ; in which 
a love of freedom appeared to him the predominating 
feature, distinguishing the whole The people of the 
colonies were descendants of Englishmen. They 
were, therefore, " not only devoted to liberty, but to 
liberty according to English ideas ; " and so they were 



Address, 

fundamentally opposed, with all the force of immemo- 
rial tradition, to that taxation without representation, 
aeainst which the Eno^lish lovers of freedom had al- 
ways fought. Their popular form of government, 
through provincial assemblies, contributed to foster 
this attachment to liberty. Their religion gave to this 
civil influence complete effect "The people," he 
said, " are Protestants ; and of that kind which is the 
most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and 
opinion. . . . Their religion is a refinement on the 
principle of resistance ; it is the dissidence of dissent, 
and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." 

If this were not strictly true in the southern colo- 
nies, where the Church of England had wider estab- 
lishment, yet the spirit of liberty was there only higher 
and haughtier than in others, because they had a mul- 
titude of slaves ; and " where this is the case," he 
affirmed, " in any part of the world, those who are 
freCj are by far the most proud and jealous of their free- 
dom. . . . The haughtiness of domination com- 
bines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders 
it invincible." 

The education of the colonies, particularly the ex- 
tent to which the study of the law was cultivated among 
them, contributed to their untractable spirit. It led 
them, not, " like more simple people, to judge of an ill 
principle in government only by an actual grievance," 
but to " anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure 
of the grievance by the badness of the principle." 



Burke's Conclusion as to the Colonies, 

The last cause of the disobedient spirit in the colo- 
nies, to which he called the attention of Parliament, 
was " laid deep in the natural constitution of things " — ■ 
in the remoteness of their situation ; the three thou- 
sand miles of ocean forever intervening between Eng- 
land and them. 

From all these sources, the ever-widening spirit of 
liberty had grown up in the colonies, now unalter- 
able by any contrivance. " We cannot," he said, " we 
cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, 
and persuade them that they are not sprung from a 
nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. 
. . . I think it is nearly as little in our power to 
change their republican religion as their free descent ; 
. . . and the education of the Americans is also on 
the same unalterable bottom with their religion ; " 
while, if all these moral difficulties could be got 
over, "the ocean remains. You cannot pump this 
dry. And as long as it continues in its present bed, 
so long all the causes which weaken authority by dis- 
tance will continue." 

His inference from all was, that no way was open 
to the Government of Great Britain, but to " com- 
ply with the American spirit as necessary ; or, if you 
please, to submit to it, as a necessaiy evil." " My hold 
of the colonies,'' he said, "is in the close affection 
which grows from common names, from kindred 
blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. 
Tliese are ties, which, though light as air, are strong as 



Address. 

links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the 
idea of their civil rights associated with your 
government ; — they will cling and grapple to you ; and 
no force under heaven will be of power to tear them 
from their allegiance. . . The more they multiply, 
the more friends you will have ; the more ardently 
they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obe- 
dience. . . It is the spirit of the English Constitu- 
tion, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, 
feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the em- 
pire, even down to the minutest member." 

If I were in the least ambitious, Ladies and Gentle- 
men, to attract your attention to any imagined skill 
of my own in presenting a subject, I should not have 
ventured thus to recall to you the magnificent scope, 
the pervading power, the instinctive and harmonious 
splendor, of that memorable oration with which, a 
hundred years ago last month, the oaken rafters of St. 
Stephen's rang. The perfect apprehension of remote 
facts, as when the distant seas or summits are seen 
by an eye which needs no glass, through a wholly 
transparent air; the vast comprehension, which took 
into immediate vision all facts and principles related 
to the subject, tracing at a glance their inter-relations, 
as one traces the lines of city streets from a ' coigne 
of vantage ' above the roofs, and sees the rivers on 
either hand which kiss the piers ; the opulence of 
knowledge ; the precision and force of argumentation ; 
the fervor of feeling, the energy of purpose, which 



The Early Spirit of the Colonies, 

modulated the rhetoric to its consenting grace and 
majesty ; the lucid and large philosophy of history ; 
the imperial imagination, vitalizing all, and touching 
it with ethereal lights : — we look at these, and almost 
feel that eloquence died when the lips of Burke were 
finally closed. One's impulse is to turn to silence ; 
and not even to offer his few small coins, more paltry 
than ever before the wealth of such regalia. 

But I have no desire at all, except to stand with 
you a few moments at the point of view at which the 
oration of Burke has placed us, and to seek, with you, 
to revive in our thoughts, with a little more of fulness 
in detail, the origin and the growth of that essential 
and prophesying spirit which he from afar discerned 
in these colonies. For in that lies the secret of oui 
subsequent history. It is not certain that Burke 
himself, looking at the matter through the partial 
lights of English narrative, and treating the subject 
for immediate practical influence upon Parliament, 
has fully set forth either the sources or the strength 
of the temper which he saw. But the complete 
understanding of these is most important to whom- 
soever would read our annals. 

The remark was long ago made by Macchiavelli,* 
that ' States are rarely formed or re-formed save by 

* " It must be laid down as a general rule, that it very seldom or 
never happens that any government is either well-founded at first, or 
thoroughly reformed afterwards, except the plan be laid and conducted 
by one man only, who has the sole power of giving all orders, and mak- 
ing all laws, that are necessary for its establishment." 

Political Discourses, upon Livy. Book I., chap. ix. 

13 



Address, 



one man.' Certainly, however, it was not so with 
ours. The spirit shaped the body, here, accordino- 
to the Platonic plan. The people formed its own 
commonwealths, its ultimate Nation; and "the peo- 
ple," says Bancroft, looking back to the peace of 
;i782, "the people was superior to its institutions, 
^ possessing the vital for^e which goes before organiza- 
tion, and gives to it strength and form."* This vital force 
therefore, in the pre-Revolutiona^^ American people' 
this inherent and energizing life, early developed' 
largely trained, acting at that time, and acting ever 
since, on our organized public development-this is 
the subject which I hope you will accept, as deserving 
your attention, and not unsuited to this occasion 
_ At the time when Burke saw the meaning, and 
interpreted the menace, of this distinctive American 
spirit. It had all the force which he ascribed to it ■ 
and the effect of it was shown, only more speedily in 
larger and more energetic discovery, than he expected 
It can scarcely be doubted that if the counsels of his 
wise statesmanship had been listened to by the Parlia- 
ment on whose unheeding ears they foil, and by the 
Court which passionately repulsed them, the separa- 
fon which was inevitable, between England and the 
eolomes, would for.^^e have been postponed; and 
some of us might have been born, on American shores, 
the loyal subjects of King George. But those coun- 
sels were not heeded; as those of Chatham, six 
• History of the United States, Vol. X, p. 593. 



First Movements in the Colonies, 

weeks earlier, in the House of Lords, had not been ; 
and just four weeks after they were uttered, before 
report of them could probably have reached this 
country, on the 19th of April, at Lexington and at 
Concord, out of the threatening murk of discontent 
shot that fierce flash of armed collision between the 
colonists and the troops of Great Britain, beyond 
which reconciliation was impossible ; of which the 
war, and the following Independence, were the pre- 
destined sequel. 

Not quite a month later, as you remember, on the 
loth of May, Ticonderoga, with Crown Point, was 
taken by the provincials ; and on the very day of the 
capture — as if to justify the name '' Carillon," given 
by the French to Ticonderoga, and to make its seizure 
the striking of a chime of bells'^ — the Continental Con- 
gress re-assembled at Philadelphia, with the proscribed 
John Hancock soon at its. head, and entered on the 
exercise of its long authority ; an authority vague and 
undefined, as such an occasional authority must be, 
but made legitimate, and made comprehensive, by the 
voluntary submission of those whom the Congress 
represented. Washington was appointed Commander- 
in-Chief. As indicative of the tendencies of public 
opinion, before the end of May^ the citizens of Meck- 
lenburg county, in North Carolina, by public action 

*"To Ticonderoga, the Indian 'Meeting of Waters,' they [the 
French] gave a name apparently singular, ' Carillon,' a Chime of Bells, 

Egbert Benson's Mem. ; Coll. of the N. Y. Hist. Soc, 2d Series : Vol. 2 
page 96. 

15 



Address. 

disowned allegiance to the British Crown, and adopted 
their declaration of Independence; and on the 17th 
of June, at Breed's Hill, the ability of the provincials 
to throw up redoubts under the cannon-fire of a fleet, 
and to make grass fences, with men behind them, a 
sufficient barrier to repeated charges of British veterans, 
was fully proved ; and the great drama of our seven 
years' war was finally opened. 

During the years immediately before us, these 
events, with those which succeeded, will be fully re- 
cited ; and eloquence and poetry, the picture and the 
bronze, will again make familiar w^hat the bulk and 
the prominence of intervening events had partly 
hidden from our view. The evacuation of Boston by 
the British ; the bloody fight on the heights behind 
Brooklyn, so nearly fatal to the American cause ; the 
crossing of the Delaware ; the night attack on the 
Hessians at Trenton ; Princeton, and Germantown, 
with the frightful winter at Valley Forge ; the battles 
of Monmouth, Saratoga, Camden, King's Mountain, 
and Eutaw Springs; the final surrender of Cornwallis, 
at Yorktown : — all will in their turn be described, as 
their centennial anniversaries occur. The Past will 
come back to us. We shall hear again the pathetic 
and heroic story which touched the common-place 
life of our childhood with romance and with awe. 

And with this will be repeated the narrative — not 
less impressive — of the civil wonders which accom- 
panied the long militar)'' struggle ; of the separate 
16 



Mr. Bancroft's History. 

Constitutions adopted by the colonies ; of the great 
Declaration, which raised those colonies jrito_ a 
Nation ; of the marvellous State-papers, which seemed 
to Europe prepared in the woods, yet on which the 
highest encomiums were pronounced, by eminent 
Englishmen, in Parliament itself; of the Articles of , 
Confederation, which prepared the way for an organic 
Union ; of the French alliance, which brought sol- 
diers of a monarchy to fight for a republic, and sent 
back with them a republican spirit too strong for the /" 
monarchy ; of the money, so worthless that a bushel 
of it would hardly buy a pair of shoes ; of the military 
stores, so utterly inadequate that barrels of sand had 
to represent powder, to encourage the troops ; of the 
final adoption, after the war, of that now venerable 
Constitution of government, which recent changes 
have expanded and modified^ but under which the 
nation has lived from that day to this. All these will 
hereafter be recited. 

It cannot but be regarded as a fortunate circum- 
stance — fortunate for himself, and for those to whose 
means of historical study he has made such large and 
brilliant contributions^ that the concluding volume 
of his History has just been published by Mr. Bancroft, 
whose relations to this Society have been so intimate ; 
and that down to the peace of 1782 he has completed 
his elaborate and shining narrative. The enthusiasm 
of youth has survived in him, to animate and enhance 
the acquisitions of age ; and those who read, in their 



Address. 

own youth, his earlier volumes, and admired alike their 
strength and polish, will rejoice that his hand has placed 
the capital upon the tall and fluted shaft. " Worthy 
deeds," said Milton, "are not often destitute of worthy 
relators ; as by a certain fate, great acts and great elo- 
quence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equal- 
ling and honoring each other in the same ages."* 

It is, of course, not my purpose to ask your attention 
to any of the particulars of that remarkable and fasci- 
nating history whose jutting outlines I have traced. 
Next week, at Lexington and at Concord, eloquent 
voices will open the story. Others will follow, in swift 
succession, till every field, and each principal fact, has 
found celebration. My office is merely preparatory to 
theirs. The subject before me is not picturesque. It 
hardly admits of any entertaining or gi'aphic treatment. 
But it nevertheless is of primary importance ; and all 
who follow will have to assume what I would exhibit, 
i There was a certain energizing spirit, an impersonal 
but inherent and ubiquitous temper, in the people of 
the colonies, which lay behind their wide and sudden 
Revolutionary movement; which pushed that move- 
ment to unforeseen ends, and which built a Republic 
where the only result sought at the outset was relief 
; from a tax. Burke discerned this, before it had been 
exhibited in the field, or had done more than give its 
own tone to debates and State-papers. From that 
time on, to the end of the war, it was constantly de- 

* Hist. Brit., Book II. 
i8 



The Spirit of the people impoi'tant. 

clared — brooding and brightening in the obscurest 
air, giving Congress its authority, giving conflict its 
meaning, inspiring leaders, restoring always the shat- 
tered and the scanty ranks. It was this invulnerable, 
inexpugnable force, which no calamities could ever 
overwhelm, which was sure, from the start, of the 
ultimate victory. 

It is this, and this only, of which the world ever 
thinks in connection with the time, or of which the 
permanent history of the country will take much 
account. The incidents are trivial, except for their re- 
lation to this. It surprises us to remember how small 
were the forces, on either side, in that " valley of decis- 
ion" in which questions so vital to us, and to mankind, 
were submitted to the arbitrament of battle ; that Bur- 
goyne's army numbered at its surrender less than six 
thousand English and German troops, and had never 
contained more than eight thousand, with an uncertain 
contingent of Canadians and Indians ; that at Camden, 
Gates had but six thousand men, only one-fourth or 
them Continentals, and Cornwallis but two thousand ; 
that the force which capitulated at Yorktown was but 
seven thousand ; and that the whole number of troops 
sent from England to this country, during the en- 
tire continuance of the war, was less than a hundred 
and thirteen thousand. 

Compare these numbers with those of the large and 
disciplined armies which Frederick II., twenty years 
earlier, encountered at Rossbach and at Leuthen ; 

19 



Address. 

compare them with those which, thirty years after, 
swarmed forth from France, under Napoleon, — and 
they are the small dust of the balance. Compare them 
with those of France, on the one hand, or of Germany 
on the other, in their tremendous unfinished duel, and 
the largest battles in which our fathers took part seem 
skirmishes of outposts. Nay, compare them with the 

' forces, from the North and the South, which fought 
each other in our late civil war, and the Revolutionary 
musters become nearly imperceptible. 

It was the spirit behind the forces, which wielded the 
instruments, and compelled the events, which gave 
these any importance in history. Impalpable, indes- 
tructible, omnipresent in activity, self-perpetuating, 
there was this vital impersonal temper, common to 
many, superior to all, which wrought and fought, from 
first to last, in the Congress, on the field. In some 
respects it was a unique force, without precise parallel 
among peoples, breaking in unexpectedly on the 
courses of history. A more or -less clear recognition 
of the fact has given to that time its relative promi- 
nence before mankind. A distinct apprehension of the 
nature of the force so victoriously revealed, is necessary 
to show how the Revolution became as complete and 

• fruitful as it was, and how that small American strug- 

'. gle, going on in a country remote and recent, and 
succeeded by events incomparably n>ore striking, has 
taken its place among the significant and memorable 

^ facts in the history of the world. 



The Colonisls plain people. 

What was that force, then ? and whence did it 
come ? If I mistake not, it was ampler in its sources, 
more abundant, more secular, and more various in its 
energy, than we have often been wont to conceive. 

There was certainly nothing of the ideal-heroic 
among the ante-Revolutionary people of this country. 
They did not live for sentiment, or on it. They were 
not doctrinaires, though they are sometimes so repre- 
sented ; and nothing could have been further from their 
plans than to make themselves champions of what did 
not concern them, or to go crusading for fanciful theo- 
ries and imaginary prizes. They were, for the most 
part, intelligent, conscientious, God-fearing people — at 
least those were such who gave tone to their com- 
munities, and the others either accepted the impres- 
sion, or achieved the imitation, of their governing 
spirit. But they were plain, practical people, almost 
wholly of the middle-class, who lived, for the most 
part, by their own labor, who were intent on practical 
advantages, and who rejoiced in conquering the wil- 
derness, in making the marsh into a meadow, in suck- 
ing by their fisheries of the abundance of the seas, and 
in seeing the first houses of logs, with mud mortar, 
and oiled paper for glass in the windows, giving place 
to houses of finished timber, or imported brick, with 
sometimes even mahogany balustrades. 

When the descendants of the settlers at the mouth 
of the Piscataqua, replied to a reproof of one of their 
ministers, that the design of their fathers in coming 



Address. 

thither had not been simply to cultivate religion, but 
also largely to trade and catch fish, they undoubtedly 
represented a spirit which had been common along 
the then recent American coast.* The Plymouth 
Colony was exceptional in its character. To a large 
extent, the later and wealthier Massachusetts Colony 
was animated by sovereign religious considerations; 
and so were those of Rhode Island and Connecticut. 
But they are certainly right who affirm that even these 
men, or many of them, showed a tough and persistent 
secular enterprise combining with their religious zeal. 
It was indeed an indispensable element to the sound- 
ness of their character. It kept them from wide fanat- 
ical excesses. It made them hardy, sagacious, inde- 
fatigable, inflexible in their hold on the fields and the 
freedoms which they had won. 

As compared with our more recent pioneers, who 
have peopled the territories, subdued the moun- 
tains, and opened toward Asia the Golden Gate, the 
religious element was certainly more prominent in 
those who earliest came to this country. But even 
they were far from being blind to material advantages, 
and far enough from being willing to live as idle en- 
thusiasts. " Give me neither poverty nor riches," was 
their constant prayer ; with an emphasis upon " poverty." 
They meant to worship God according to their con- 
sciences ; and woe be to him who should forbid ! But 
they meant, also, to get what of comfort and enjoyment 

* Adams' Annals of Portsmouth. Page 94. 



Misconception of the Colonists easy, 

they could, and of physical possession, from the world 
in which " they worshipped ; and they felt themselves 
co-workers with God, when the orchard was planted, 
and the wild vine tamed ; when the English fruits had 
been domesticated, under the shadow of savage for- 
ests, and the maize lifted its shining ranks upon the 
fields that had been barren ; when the wheat and rye 
were rooted in the valleys, and the grass was made to 
grow upon the mountains. 

It is easy, of course, to heighten the common, to 
magnify the rare and superior virtues, of men to whom 
we owe so much. Time itself assists to this, as it 
makes the mosses and lichens grow on ancient walls, 
disguising with beauty the rent and ravage. It is 
easy to exaggerate their religious enthusiasm, till all 
the other traits of their character are dimmed by its 
excessive brightness. Our filial pride inclines us to 
this ; for, if we could, we should love to feel, all of us, 
that we are sprung from untitled nobles, from saints 
who needed no canonization, from men of such heroic 
mould, and women of such tender devoutness, that the 
world elsewhere was not worthy of them ; that they 
brought to these coasts a wholly unique celestial life, 
through the scanty cabins which were to it as a 
manger, and the quaint apparel which furnished its 
swaddling-clothes ; that airs Elysian played around 
them, while they took the wilderness, as was said of 
the Lady Arbella Johnson, "on their way to heaven." 

I cannot so read their history. Certainly, I should 

23 



Address, 

be the last in this assembly to say any word — in what- 
ever haste, in whatever inadvertence — in disparage- 
ment of those who, with a struggle that we never 
I have paralleled and can scarcely comprehend, planted 
1 firmly the European civilization upon these shores. 
I remember the hardness which they endured, and 
shame be to me, if, out of the careless luxury of our 
time, I say an unworthy word of those who faced for 
us the forest and the frost, the Indian and the wolf, 
the gaunt famine and the desolating plague. I re- 
member that half the Plymouth colonists died the 
first winter, and that in the spring, when the long- 
waiting Mayflower sailed again homeward, not one of 
the fainting survivors went with her, — and I gloiy in 
that unflinching fortitude which has given renown to 
the sandy shore ! Our vigor is flaccid, our grasp 
uncertain, our stiffest muscle is limp and loose, beside 
the unyielding grapple of their tough wills. 

But what I do say is, that the figures of even the 
eminent among them were not so colossal as they 
sometimes appear, through the transfiguring mists of 
Time ; that of culture, as we know it, they for the 
most part had enjoyed very little ; that even in char- 
acter they were consciously far from being perfect. 
They were plain people, hard-working, Bible-reading, 
much in earnest, with a deep sense of God in them, 
and a thorough detestation of the devil and his works ; 
who had come hither to get a fresh and large oppor- 
tunity for work and life ; who were here set in cir- 
24 



The Colonists transferring great forces. 

cumstances which gave stimulus to their energy., and 
brought out their pecuhar and masterful forces. But 
they were not, for the most part, beyond their asso- 
ciates across the seas in force or foresight ; and they 
left behind them many their peers, and some their 
superiors, in the very qualities which most impress us. 
"- Not many wise, not many noble, not many mighty," 
— then, as aforetime, that was true of those whom God 
called. The common people, with their pastors and 
guides, had come to the v/oods, to labor, and pros- 
per, and hear God's word. And upon them He put 
the immense honor of building here a temple and a 
citadel, whose walls we mark, whose towers we count, 
and to which the world has since resorted. 

But it is, also, always to be remembered that the 
early settlers of this country were not of one stock 
merely, but of several ; and that all of them came out 
of communities which had had to face portentous 
problems, and which were at the time profoundly 
stirred by vast moral and political forces. They were 
themselves impregnated with these forces. They 
bore them imbedded in their consciousness ; entering, 
whether articulately or not, with a dominant force 
into their thought, into their life. They transported 
to these coasts, by the simple act of transferring their 
life hither, a power and a promise from the greatest 
age of European advancement. They could not have 
helped it, if they would. They could more easily have 

left behind the speech which they had learned in child- 

25 



Address. 

hood, than they could have dropped, on their stomiy 
way across the ocean, the self-reliance, the indomitable 
courage, the constructive energy, and the great aspira- 
tion, of which the lands they left were full. 

This, it seems to me, is hardly recognized as clearly 
and widely as it should be : that the public life of a 
magnificent age — a life afterward largely, for a time, 
displaced in Europe, by succeeding reactions — was 
brought to this continent, from different lands, under 
different languages, by those who settled it ; that it 
was the powerful and moulding initial force in our 
civilization ; and that here it survived, from that time 
forward, shaping affairs, erecting institutions, and mak- 
ing the Nation what it finally came to be. 

They may not themselves have been wholly aware 
of what they brought. There was nothing in the out- 
ward circumstance of their action to make it distin- 
guished. They had no golden or silver censers in 
which to transport the undecaying and costly flame. 
They brought it as fire is sometimes carried, by rough 
hands, in hollow reeds. But they brought it, never- 
theless ; and here it dwelt, sheltered and fed, till a 
continent was illumined by it. Let us think of this a 
little. Let some rapid suggestions call up to us the 
times, the new and unmeasured energies of which 
swept out to this continent, when the colonists came ; 
all the forces of which — political, social, and not 
merely religious — found here their enlarging arena. 

At the time of the seizure of New Netherland by 



Elements of the Population. 

the English, in 1664, the main elements of the popu- 
lation, afterward composing the thirteen colonies, were 
already" on these shores. Subsequent arrivals brought 
increase of numbers, except in New England, where 
the English immigration was then at its end. Impor- 
tant colonies, as Pennsylvania and Georgia, date their 
existence from a time more recent. But the principal 
nationalities of northern and north-western Europe, 
from which our early population was derived, had 
already representatives here ; and what followed con- 
tributed rather to the increase than to the change of 
that population. It was said, you know, that eight- 
een languages were spoken before then in the' thriv- 
ing village which Stuyvesant surrendered, and which 
is now this swarming metropolis ; *' and we certainly 
know that Englishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes, Germans, 
French Huguenots, Scotch Presbyterians, Quakers, 
and Catholics, were at that time upon the American 
coast. 

From that point, then, it is well to look back, and 
see what was the governing spirit, the diffused and 
moulding moral life, which the steady immigration of 
sixty years, back to the date of the building of James- 
town, had been bringing hither. For these sixty years, in 

* This surprising statement appears to have been first made as early 
as 1643, by the Director-General Kieft, to Father Jogues, the Jesuit 
Priest, escaped from the Iroquois, who was then his guest. It was 
afterward repeated by Father Jogues, in his Description of New Nether- 
land. 

Coll. N. Y. Hist. Soc, ad Series. Vol 3 : page 215. 

a7 



Address. 

comparison with the hundred and ten which followed, 
were like the first twenty-five years in one's personal life, 
compared with the fifty which succeed. They gave the 
direction, projected the impulse, prescribed the law, of 
the subsequent development ; and they, of course, sur- 
pass in importance any other equal period, in showing 
how the nation came at last to be what it was. But 
these sixty years, also, were vitally connected with the 
forty or fifty which had gone before them ; since in 
those had been born, and morally trained, the men and 
women who subsequently came hither. Out of those 
had come the vivifying forces which the settlers at 
Jamestown, and they who came later, transferred to 
this continent. We shall not have reached the top- 
roots of our history, till we have gone back to their 
beginning. 

Look back, then, from the surrender of New Am- 
sterdam, to the date of the coronation of Queen Eliza- 
beth, in 1558 — less than fifty years before James- 
town began, little more than fifty years before Adrian 
Block built on this island its first small ship,''' and 
named it " The Restless," — and you have before you 

* This was in 1614 ; but another ship had been previously constructed 
on the coast. " Mr. Cooper, in his Naval History, speaks of Block's 
yacht as ' the first decked vessel built within the old United States.' But 
the honor ot precedence in American naval architecture must fairly be 
yielded to Popham's unfortunate colony on the Kennebec. The ' Vir- 
ginia,' of Sagadahoc, was the first European-built vessel within the 
original thirteen States. The ' Restless,' of Manhattan, was the pioneer 
craft of New York." 

Brodhead's Hist, of New York. Vol. I., page 55. (Note.) 

28 



A remarkable Century. 

the remarkable century, out of which had broken the 
settlements on these shores, at the end of which they 
all had passed under British supremacy. That was the 
birth-time of our public life. From its great spirit, 
from its energetic and vivid experience, fell a splendor 
and a power on the embryo people which finally be- 
came the American Nation. 

It was a munificent, a heroical century ; in which, 
for the first time, the immense vigor of popular en- 
thusiasm entered decisively into national development, 
and forced acceptance from statesmen and kings ; 
which was, accordingly, the boldest in plan, the widest 
in work, the most replete with constructive energy, 
which up to that time had been known in Europe. 
Fruitful schemes, strenuous struggles, extraordinary 
genius, amazing achievement, the decay of authority, 
the swift advance of popular power — ^these so crowd 
the annals of it that no brief narrative could give a 
summary of them. Long repressed tendencies came 
to sudden culmination. Hidden forces found vast 
development. The exuberant and out-breaking ener- 
gies of Christendom could no more be restrained 
within ancient limitations, than the lightnings, elabo- 
rated in hidden chambers of earth and sky, can be lock- 
ed in the clouds from which they leap. 

The invention of the movable type, a hundred years 
earlier, at Harlem or at Maintz, had made books the 
possession of many, where manuscripts had been the 
luxury of the few. Knowledge was distributed, and 

29 



Address. 

thought was interchanged, on this new vehicle, with a 
freedom, to a breadth, before unknown. The found- 
ing of libraries, the enlargement of universities, had 
given opportunity for liberal studies ; and the ancient 
world drew nearer to the modern, as the elegant letters 
of Greece and Rome made the genius and the action 
aofain familiar with which their times had been iilus- 
trious. At the same time, the discovery of this conti- 
nent had expanded the globe to the minds of Euro- 
peans, and had opened new areas, the more exciting be- 
cause undefined, to their enterprise and hope. The 
popular imagination, in the early part of that age, was 
stirred by tales of sea-faring adventure as it had never 
been by the wildest fiction. The air was full of ro- 
mance and wonder, as savage forests, dusky figures, 
feathered crests, ornaments of barbaric gold, strange 
habitations, unheard-of populations, were lifted before 
the gaze of Europe, along the new Western horizon. 
Almost nothing appeared incredible. Grotius him- 
self, scholar, jurist, statesman as he was, cautious by 
nature, and trained in courts, was inclined to believe 
in an arctic race whose heads grew beneath their 
shoulders. El Dorado was to Raleigh as real a local- 
ity as the duchy of Devon. Even Caliban and Puck 
seemed almost possible persons, in an age so full of 
astounding revelations. 

But neither the magical art of printing, nor the dis- 
covery of the transatlantic continent, had stirred with 
such tumultuous force the mind of Christendom as 

30 



Influence of the Reforjnation. 

had the sudden Reformation of rehgion, starting in 
Germany, and swiftly extending through Northern 
Europe. To those who accepted it, this seemed a 
revival of Divine revelations. It brought the Most 
High to immediate personal operation upon them. 
As in the old prophetic days, the voice of speech came 
echoing forth, from the amber brightness which was 
as the appearance of the bow in the cloud. The in- 
stant privilege, the constant obligation, of every man 
to come to God, by faith in His Son ; the dignity of 
that personal nature in man for which this Son of 
God had died ; the vastness of the promises, whose 
immortal splendors interpreted the cross ; the regal 
right of every soul to communion, by the word, with 
the Spirit by whom that word was given : — these 
broke, like a flash from heights celestial, not only on 
the devout and the studious, but over the common life 
of nations. 

Before the force so swiftly and supremely inspired, 
whatever resisted it had to give way. It not only re- 
leased great multitudes of men into instant inde- 
pendence of the ancient dominant spiritual authority. 
It loosened the ligatures, or shattered the strength, of 
temporal tyrannies ; and its impulses went more wide- 
ly than its doctrines. In Italy and Spain, as well as in 
England, in the parts of Germany which retained 
their ancient allegiance to the Pontiff, as well as in 
those which had thrown this off, there was an unwont- 
ed stimulation in the air ; and the forces, of learning, 

31 



Address. 

of logic, or of arms, which fought against the Refor- 
mation, were themselves more eager and more effective 
because of the impulse which it had given. 

Commerce was extending, as letters and liberties 
were thus advancing. Inventions followed each other 
almost as swiftly, with almost as much of startling 
novelty, as in our own time ; and the ever-increasing 
consciousness of right, of opportunity, and of power, 
the sense of liberation, the expectation of magnificent 
futures — these extended among the peoples, with a 
rapidity, in a measure, before unknown. 

It was an age, therefore, not so much of destruction, 
as of paramount impulse to wide and bold enterprise. 
Vast hopes, vast works, imperial plans, were native to 
it. It was an age of detonating strife, but of study, 
too, and liberal thought ; of the noblest poetry, the 
most copious learning, a busy industry, a discursive 
philosophy, a sagacious statesmanship ; when astonish- 
ing discovery stimulated afresh magnificent enterprise ; 
when great actions crowded upon each other ; when 
the world seemed to have suddenly turned plastic, and 
to offer itself for man's rebuilding ; when each decade 
of years, to borrow an energetic expression of Brough- 
am, " staggered, under a load of events which had for- 
merly made centuries to bend." 

So far as the South of Europe is concerned, it is 
represented to us chiefly, certainly most pleasantly, by 
the great names, in literature or in fine art, by which 

it is distinguished ; Tasso, crowned at Rome, and 

32 



Renowned Men of the Century, 

Galileo, condemned ;* Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de 
Vega, in Spain ; Tintoretto, with his audacity of 
genius, and the lightning of his pencil ; Cagliari, bet- 
ter known as Paul Veronese, Guido Reni, the Ca- 
racci ; Velasquez, Murillo, and Salvator Rosa. It saw 
the close of Titian's life, and of Michael Angelo's. It 
saw the completion of the dome of St. Peter's. 

In Northern Europe great clusters of names also 
shine on the century, of men preeminent in science, 
letters, or the fine arts ; Kepler, Tycho Brahe ; Moliere, 
Racine, Rochefoucauld, Pascal ; Rubens, Rembrandt, 
Van Dyke, Claude Lorraine. Edmund Spenser, the 
Prince of Poets,' as his monument describes him, fill- 
ed his career in it ; Richard Hooker, Philip Sidney, 
Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, John Selden, Isaac 
Casaubon. It bears upon its brow, as it moves in the 
great procession of historic periods, the dazzling dia- 
dem of the name of Shakespeare. It saw the youth 
of Leibnitz, and of Newton. It heard the music of Mil- 
ton's verse. It saw the entire life of Descartes, the 
middle manhood of Spinoza, It watched Grotius 
from his birth to his burial, in the city of Delft. 

* The traveler to Rome, visiting the church of S. Maria sopra 
Minerva, will hardly fail to feel the propriety of its name, if it is recalled 
to him that in one of the halls of the monastery attached to it, then oc- 
cupied by the Inquisition, Galileo met his sentence, and pronounced his 
retraction : " I abjure, curse, and detest, the error and the heresy of the 
motion of the earth," etc. It startles one to remember that this was at 
as late a date as June 22, 1633 ; five years before Harvard College was 
founded. The Inquisition itself has since seen the truth of the more 
celebrated words which the aged philosopher is said to have uttered, in 
an under tone, when rising from his knees, 

33 



Address. 

The telescope came to light in it ; and brought to 
men's view vast whirls of suns, as if re-creating for 
them the heavens. The microscope was so perfected 
as to carry the sight, almost without exaggeration, from 
the infinitely great to the infinitely little, and to show 
the marvels of organization in creatures so minute that 
a speck of dust is a mountain beside them. The ther- 
mometer, the barometer, the air-pump, the nature and 
use of electricity, the circulation of the blood — these 
are among its great discoveries. The mariner's com- 
pass was improved and illumined till it became al- 
most a new instrument. The first English newspaper 
had its origin in this century. Logarithms were in- 
vented. The Royal Exchange was opened in Lon- 
don. The Dutch and English East India Companies 
were established. The globe was explored on every 
meridian, by the search of its discovery. It gained 
new luxuries, as well as new arts, and was the first 
century sweetened in Europe by the manufacture of 
refined sugar, or soothed and stimulated by tobacco 
and coffee. 

Things like these are the surface indications of pro- 
digious forces working beneath; like the specks or 
wreaths of glittering spume which are flung into the 
air, when immense currents rush into collision. But 
the intensity and the breadth of these forces are better 
represented by the national changes which the cen- 
tury witnessed. 

To look only at the states of Northern Europe, it 

34 



II 



Changes in Nations. 

saw the magnificent reign of Elizabeth, the great 
English Rebellion, the execution of Charles First, the 
ten years of the Commonwealth, the final return of 
Charles Second. It saw the Huguenot struggle in 
France, the stormy youth and the brilliant govern- 
ment of Henry Fourth, the following reign of Louis 
Thirteenth, the earlier successes of Louis Fourteenth ; 
the long ministry of Sully, on whom Henry leaned 
with such justified confidence ; the triumph of Riche- 
lieu, who broke the power of feudalism on the one 
hand, of political protestantism on the other, and who 
" made his royal master," as Montesquieu said, " the 
second man in France, but the first in Europe ; hum- 
bling the king, while he exalted the monarchy." It 
saw the ministry, the marriage, and the death, of Car- 
dinal Mazarin. 

The forty years' reign of Philip Second filled nearly 
half of it. It witnessed the amazing revolt of the Neth- 
erlands, their successful resistance of all the Spanish 
fleets and forces, their final establishment of a Protestant 
Republic. It saw the regeneration of Sweden ; and it 
included, in its extraordinary and comprehensive annals, 
the whole course of the Thirty Years' War, with the 
sorrow and sacrifice which that involved, the heroic 
energies which it revealed, till it closed in the welcome 
peace of Westphalia. 

Another century so energized by great emergent 
opinions, so suddenly full of a vehement and conquer- 
ing public life, so prolific in enterprise, so swarming 

35 



Address. 

with productive force, one must look long to find. 
When we reach it in history we are conscious of step- 
ping out of the Past, into the modern life of Christen- 
dom. The patience, skill, inventive daring, of our civili- 
zation, were more vitally a part of it than were its longest 
and fiercest conflicts. It fought, to get more room for 
work. Elemental rages darkened the heavens. The 
concussion of ethereal forces was constant. Yet the 
work of construction went always forward, and on the 
broadest national scale. New liberties were asserted 
and organized. New states came rounding into form. 
The descendants of the Batavians made the scanty 
lands which they had rescued from the wash of the 
sea, the seat of a history more majestic in its 
elements, both of tragedy and of triumph, than the 
Continent had seen, and the centre of a commerce 
which flung its tentacles around the globe. The Eng- 
lish fleets, in which Catholic and Protestant fought 
together, scattered the Armada, under skies that seem- 
ed to conspire for their help, and hit, as with ceaseless 
lightning strokes, the ships, and coasts, and power of 
Spain ; while all the time went widely on, with only 
indeed augmented impulse, the labor of inventors, 
the studies of scholars, the voyages of discoverers, the 
theologian's discussion, the painter's pencil, and the 
statesman's plan. 

So full of immense movement was the century, 
so opulent in achievement, so mighty in impulse, 

that the earth seemed freshly alive beneath it, the skies 

36 



Northern Europe full of life. 

burnished with prophetic gleams. The common peo- 
ple, for a time at least, had mastered their place in 
politics and society ; and the whole mind of Northern 
Europe was full of an intense stimulation. Education 
was wide. Plain men, like Governor Bradford, never 
trained in any university, were easy masters of five or 
six languages.* Farmers' sons, like Francis Drake, be- 
came great admirals. The enterprise of the time was 
not reckless or vague, but was the expression of this 
abounding, exuberant life, instructed by research, and 
guided by courageous wisdom. There was nothing 
factitious in the force of the century, as there is noth- 
ing deceptive in its fame. Alive in every fibre, with 
an exultant and stimulated life. Northern Europe sent 
forth its freshly-awakened, world-sweeping activities, as 
streams are shot into sudden motion when the Easter 
sun unlocks the ice. 

This was the century out of the midst of which the 
early settlers of this continent came ; whose eager 
energies came here with them. They were not its 
splendid representatives. No fleets of galleons brought 
them over. They came in coarse clothing, not in 
raiment of velvet, or gilded armor. They attracted 

* " He was a person for study, as well as action ; and hence, notwith- 
standing the difficulties throug-h which he passed in his youth, he attained 
unto a notable skill in languages : the Dutch tongue was become al- 
most as vernacular to him as the English ; the French tongue he could 
also manage ; the Latin, and the Greek, he had mastered ; but the He- 
brew he most of all studied, ' because,' he said, ' he would see with his 
own eyes the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty.' " 

Mather's Magnalia. Book 2, Chap. I., § 9. 

37 



Address. 

little attention at the time. They only seemed to 
themselves to be doing a work which soniehow had 
fallen to their lot, and which must be done ; and that 
the century which they represented would be more 
illustrious by reason of their action, was certainly a 
thought which never occurred to them. But they 
shared its life, if not its renown ; they brought its 
vigor, if not its wealth. Their small stockades, at 
Jamestown and Plymouth, at New Amsterdam and 
Fort Orange, were the points on our coast where that 
energetic and sovereign century, then passing over 
Europe, set up its banners. 

We never shall understand them, or their work, 
except this be before us. 

Recall, then, the England which the colonists left 
and represented. Elizabeth herself had been dead 
four years when they landed at Jamestown, and seven- 
teen years when they settled at Plymouth ; but the 
image of her imperious face was on most of the coins 
which they brought hither, an4 the memories of her 
reign had a force more vital than the actual power of 
her successor. The middle-aged could well remember 
the camps, the watch-fires, the universal excitements, 
of the year of the Armada. The young might have 
read, upon broad-sheets, her '' Golden Speech " to her 
last Parliament.* The older might have sailed with 

* " There seemed for a moment to be some danger that the long- and 

glorious reign of EUzabeth would have a shameful and disastrous end. She, 

however, with admirable judgment and temper, declined the contest, put 

herself at the head of the reforming party, redressed the grievance, 

38 



The Reaction in England. 

Frobisher or Drake, or themselves have borne arms 
under the famous admirals and captains, who, at her 
inspiration, had fought with a triumphant energy on 
sea and land. 

The very temper which now strove to displace 
that earlier spirit only contributed to make it signal. 
Raleigh was beheaded October 29th, 1618 ; eleven 
years after Jamestown commenced, two years before 
the Mayflower's voyage. That was the last passionate 
blow of the vanquished Spain at the age of Elizabeth, 
whose energy and whose chivalry he represented. It 
showed the unsleeping animosity of the Spaniard ; but 
it also brought into startling exhibition the weakness 
and wickedness which were now on the throne from 
which the great daughter of Anne Boleyn had lately 
passed ; and the spatter * of his blood smote every 
heart, which was loyal to the Past, with pain and rage. 
Carlyle has suggested that Oliver Cromwell was per- 
haps at that time living in London, a student of lav/, 
and may have been a spectator of the scene. Many 
others, who were afterward in this country, must have 
seen the gallant and cultured man whose youthful 
grace had attracted Elizabeth, and whose life had 
imaged the splendor of the age ; and a sharp sense of 

thanked the Commons, in touching and dignified language, for their ten- 
der care of the general weal, brought back to herself the hearts of the 
people, and left to her successors a memorable example of the way in 
which it behooves a ruler to deal with public movements which he has 
not the means of resisting." 

Macaulay: Hist, of England. Vol. I., page d^. ■ 

39 



Address. 

the Nemesis in history may well have startled them 
when the son and successor of the royal assassin bowed 
his reluctant and haughty head beneath the axe, in 
front of Whitehall. 

The daring and inspiring spirit which had marked 
the preceding half-century was not destroyed, by the 
murder of one of its representatives, or by the treachery 
of another. A year after the landing at Plymouth, 
Thomas Wentworth, afterward known as Earl of 
Strafford, that ' great, brave, bad man,' whom Mac- 
aulay has pictured with a pencil so exquisite and so 
unrelenting, declared in Parliament, with vehement 
emphasis, that " the liberties, franchises, privileges, and 
jurisdictions of Parliament, are the ancient and un- 
doubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of 
England." That was then a passionate conviction in 
the House of Commons. Twenty years later, when 
he who then uttered it had been for twelve years its 
fierce antagonist, it caught him in its grasp, and swept 
him to the scaffold. The pre-Revolutionary struggle 
of our fathers had its prophecy in that sentence. Its 
seminal principle involved their whole contest. 

Before the Pilgrims sailed from Holland, he whom 

Elizabeth, forty years before, in the superb promise of 

his youth, had called her " young Lord Keeper," was 

Chancellor of England. His " Novum Organum " 

might have come to our shores with Bradford and 

Carver; his later writings with Winthrop and Higgin- 

son. His immense influence on human thought syn- 
40 



Shakespeare, and Milton. 

chronises completely with the English settlements on 

our coast. The then new English version of the 

Scriptures was just in time to gild with its lights, of 

Hebrew story and Christian faith, the rude life on 

savage shores. Shakespeare had died, untimely, in 

1616 ; and the first collected edition of his plays was 

published in the year of the settlement of this city. 

How far the impulse and renown of his genius had 

preceded his death we cannot be sure ; but the children 

of those who had never read, who certainly had not 

seen his plays at the Blackfriars' or the Globe, have 

been debtors ever since to that supreme and visioned 

mind which reanimated the past, interpreted history, 

and searched the invisible spirit of man as if it were 

transparent crystal. Milton was a lad, twelve years 

old, when the Plymouth colony began, having been 

born, in 1608, in Bread street, London, under the 

armorial sign of the " Spread Eagle ; " and his public 

life was wholly accomplished within the period now 

under review, though it was not till later that the 

" Paradise Lost " was published in London, and the 

chequered and lofty life of the poet was closed in sleep. 

These names make the age which presents them 

majestic. But their chief importance to us, at this 

moment, is derived from the fact that they represent 

a popular life which preceded themselves, and which 

quickened the personal genius that surpassed it. The 

authors were the fountain-shafts, through which shot 

up, in flashing leap, the waters flowing from distant 

41 



Address. 

heights. With the various beauty, the incomparable 
force, of their differing minds, they gave expression to 
impalpable influences of which the age itself was full. 

The same influences wrought in humbler men, who 
could not give them such expression. They were the 
vital inheritance of our fathers. The men of the English 
middle-class, — they were the men from the loins of 
whose peers, and whose possible associates, Raleigh, 
and Shakespeare, and Milton, had sprung. They could 
not, many of them, read the Latin of the " De Aug- 
mentis." They might not appreciate the cosmic com- 
pleteness of Shakespeare's mind, or the marvellous 
beauty of Comus and L'Allegro. But they incorpor- 
ated, more than others, the essential spirit of that pro- 
lific, prophetic age, which had found its voice in these 
supreme writers. They had breathed from infancy 
that invigorating air which was full of discovery, enter- 
prise, hope, of widened learning, popular enthusiasm, 
a fresh and vivid Christian faith* They had felt the 
inrush of that vehement life which for sixty years 
had been sweeping over England ; and the irrepressible 
temper of the time, which gave birth to the letters, 
impulse to the discovery, law to the statesmanship, 
life to the religion, of the age of Elizabeth, was as 
much a part of them as their bones and their blood. 

They came, in large part, because they represented 
that spirit ; because it seemed to them likely thence- 
forth to be less common and governing in England ; 
and because they would rather encounter the seas, and 



The Dutch, and Walloons. 

face the perils and pains of the wilderness, than tarry 
in a country where James was king, and George 
Villiers was minister. When Endicott cut out the 
cross at Salem from the banner of England, he ex- 
pressed a temper as old and as stubborn as the fights 
against Spain. When Wadsworth, fifty years later, 
seized the charter of Connecticut, and hid it in the 
Wyllys' oak, he did precisely what the English tradi- 
tions of a century earlier had enjoined as his duty. 
And when the discerning Catholics of Maryland 
accepted religious freedom in their colony, they only 
expressed anew the spirit in which their fathers had 
fought the Armada, though the pontiff had blessed it, 
in their loyalty to a Queen against whom he had pro- 
claimed a crusade. 

It is never to be forgotten that that wonderful century, 
which saw at its beginning the coronation of Eliza- 
beth, and at its end the death of Cromwell — the age 
of GrcnvillCj Raleigh, Drake, of Bacon, Shakespeare, 
and the manhood of Milton — that was the century, in 
which the arts arid arms of England, its resolute tem- 
per, and its sagacious and liberal life, were solidly 
planted upon these shores. 

The powerful element brought from Holland, by the 
Dutch and the Walloons, was only the counterpart of 
this. An eminent American has made it familiar, in 
our time, to all who admire heroism in action, and 
eloquence in story. 

Mr. Motley has said of William the Silent, that 

43 



Address. 

" his efforts were constant to elevate the middle-class ; 
to build up a strong third party, which should unite 
much of the substantial wealth and intelligence of the 
land, drawing constantly from the people, and deriving 
strength from national enthusiasm, — a party which 
should include nearly all the political capacity of the 
country ; and his efforts were successful." * " As to the 
grandees, they were mostly of those who sought to ' swim 
between two waters,' according to the Prince's expres- 
sion." The boers, or laborers, were untrained and coarse, 
not the material with which to erect an enduring com- 
monwealth ; and on this stalwart middle-class, trained by 
churches and common-schools, skillful in enterprise, 
patient in industry, fervent in patriotism, unconquerable 
in courage, the illustrious patriot depended, under God, 
for the safety of his country. 

Among the inhabitants of the province of New 
Netherland, when it came into the English possession, 
were many representing this class. The early servants 
of the West India Company had been succeeded by 
farmers and traders. The patroons of the vast and in- 
definite manors had, for the most part, tarried at 
home, and their titles had largely been extinguished. 
The colonists then here, — agriculturists, mechanics, 
sailors, dealers — represented fairly the commercial, 
political, social spirit, which was prevalent in Holland ; 
and while wolves and Indians filled the forests, which 
then extended from Canal Street to Harlem, the life 

* Rise of the Dutch Republic. Vol. III., page 219. 
44 



Attitude of the Netherlands. 

in the two separated settlements was much the same 
as in the equal contemporaneous villages of the Father- 
land. Maurice — for whom the Hudson River had first 
been named — was Stadtholder of the Netherlands, 
when the permanent settlement was made here ; and 
the clouded lustre of his great name was still vivid 
with a gleam from the past. Only two years before, 
the contest with Spain had re-commenced. During the 
preceding twelve years' armistice, the United Nether- 
lands had passed through a disastrous interval, of 
religious dissension, ambitious intrigue, and popular 
tumult. But that was now ended ; and the first 
stroke of the Spanish arms, under Spinola, had revived 
the magnificent tradition of the days when, as their 
historian has said, " the provinces were united in one 
great hatred, and one great hope." The interval of 
peace had not softened the stubborness of their purpose 
to be free. They were ready again ' to pass through 
the sea of blood, that they might reach the promised 
land ; ' and all that was inspiring in the annals of 
two preceding generations came out to instant exhibi- 
tion, as hidden pictures are drawn forth by fire. 

The earlier years of Maurice himself, when the twig 
was becoming the tree — " tandem fit surculus arbor ;^' 
his following victories, when the renowned Spanish 
commanders were smitten by him into utter rout, as 
at Nieuport and at Turnhout ; the fatal year of the 
murder of his father, when the ' nation lost its guiding- 
star, and the little children cried in the streets ; ' the 

45 



Address. 

frightful " Spanish fury " at Antwerp ; the siege of 
Leyden, and the young university which commemo- 
rated the heroism of those who had borne it ; the siege 
of Harlem, and all the rage and agony of its close : — 
these things came up, and multitudes more — the whole 
panorama in which these were incidents — when the 
Spaniards sought, in 1622, to open the passage into 
the North by capturing the town of Bergen-op-Zoom, 
and when Maurice relieved it. The temper which 
this tremendous experience, so intense and prolonged, 
had bred in the Hollanders — the omnipresent, inde- 
structible spirit, not wholly revealed in any one per- 
son, but partly in millions— rthis was again as vigorous 
as ever, throughout the Republic which it had created, 
when the thirty families came to this island, when the 
two hundred persons were resident here, in 1625. 

Some of those then here, more who followed, were 
of the same class, the same occupation and habit of 
life, with those who had fought for sixty years, on sea 
and land, against the frenzied assaults of Spain ; who, 
under Heemskirk, had smitten her fleet into utter de- 
struction, beneath the shadow of Gibraltar ; who had 
fought her ships on eveiy wave, and had blown up 
their own rather than let her flag surmount them ; 
who had more than once opened the dykes, and wel- 
comed the sea, rather than yield to the Spanish pos- 
session the lands thus drowned ; who had ravaged the 
coasts, and captured the colonies, of the haughty Pe- 
ninsula ; and who, in the midst of all this whirlwind of 
46 



Education in the Netherlands, 

near and far battle, had been inaugurating new forms 
of Government, cultivating religion, advancing edu- 
cation, developing the arts, draining the lakes, and or- 
ganizing a commerce that surrounded the world. 

When the four Dutch forts were established — at this 
point, at Harlem, at Fort Orange, on the Delaware, 
— this spirit was simply universal in Holland ; and 
those who came hither could not but bring it, unless 
they had dropped their identity on the way. They 
came for trade. They came to purchase lands by 
labor ; to get what they could from the virgin soil, 
and send peltries and timber back to Holland. But 
they brought the patience, the enterprise and the cour- 
age, the indomitable spirit, and the hatred of tyranny, 
into which they had been born, into which their na- 
tion had been baptized with blood. 

Education came with them ; the free schools, in 
which Holland had led the van of the world, being 
early transplanted to these shores ; a Latin school be- 
ing established here in 1659, to which scholars were 
sent from distant settlements. * An energetic 
Christian faith came with them, with its Bibles, its 
ministers, its interpreting books. Four years before, 
Grotius, imprisoned in the castle of Louvestein, had 

* " It is very pleasant to reflect that the New England pilgrims, during 
their residence in the glorious country of your ancestry, found already 
established there a system of schools which John of Nassau, eldest 
brother of William the Silent, had recommended in these words : ' You 
must urge upon the States General that they should establish free schools, 
where children of quality, as well as of poor families, for a very small • 
sum, could be well and Christianly educated and brought up. This 

47 



Address. 

written his notes upon the Scriptures, and that treatise 
on the Truth of the Christian Religion, which, within 
the same century, was translated from the original 
Dutch into Latin, English, French, Flemish, German, 
Swedish, Persian, Arabic, the language of Malacca, and 
modern Greek. He had written it, he says, for 
the instruction of sailors ; that they might read it in 
the leisure of the voyage, as he had written it in the 
leisure of confinement, and might carry the impression 
of that Christianity whose divinity it affirmed, around 
the globe. Copies of it may easily have come hither 
in the vessels of the nation which had no forests, but 
which owned more ships than all Europe beside. 

The political life of the Hollanders had come, as 
well as their commercial spirit, and their decisive re- 
ligious faith. They loved the liberty for which they 
and their fathers had tenaciously fought. They saw 
its utilities, and understood its conditions ; and if you 
recall the motto of the Provinces, in their earlier strug- 
gle — " Concordia, res parvoe crescunt ; Dzscordia, 
maximoe dilabitnttir " — and if you add a pregnant sen- 
tence from their Declaration of Independence, made in 
July, 1 581, I think you will have some fair impression 
of the influences which afterward wrought in this 

would be the greatest and most useful work you could ever accomplish, 
for God and Christianity, and for the Netherlands themselves.' . . . 
This was the feeling about popular education in the Netherlands, during 
the 1 6th century." 

Mr. Motley's Letter to St. Nicholas Society ; quoted in Address of 
Hon. J. W. Bcekman, 1869, pp. 30, 31. 
48 



Declaration of Independence. 

land, transported hither by those colonists. "When 
the Prince," says that Declaration, *' does not fulfil his 
duty as protector, when he oppresses his subjects, des- 
troys their ancient liberties, and treats them as slaves, 
he is to be considered not a Prince, but a Tyrant. As 
such, the Estates of the land may lawfully and reason- 
ably depose him, and elect another in his place."'"^* They 
did not elect another to the place ; but, renouncing 
their allegiance to Philip, as their children did after- 
ward to George Third, they founded a Republic, which 
lasted on those oozy plains two hundred years. 

The very temper which afterward spoke in the pub- 
lic documents issued from Philadelphia, had been 
uttered in Holland two centuries earlier ; and they 
who came hither from that land of dykes, storks, and 
windmills, had brought it as part of their endowment. 
No master-pieces came with them, of Rubens or Rem- 
brandt, whose genius flourished in the same centuiy, 
under the skies lurid with battle, and on the soil fattened 
with blood. No wealth came with them, like that 
which already was making Amsterdam—" the Venice 
of the North " — one of the richest towns in Europe. 
They built a stone chapel, in 1642 f ; but they could not 
reproduce on these shores a single one of the scores of 
churches, stately and ancient, which they had left, nor 

* Rise of Dutch Republic. Vol. III., page 509. 

t " A contract was made with John and Richard Ogden, of Stamford, 
for the mason-work of a stone church, seventy-two feet long, fifty wide, 
and sixteen high, at a cost of twenty-five hundred guilders, and a gratuity 
of one hundred more if the work should be satisfactory. The walls were 

49 



Address, 

any of those superb civic palaces in which the Nether- 
land cities were rich. But amid whatever straitness of 
poverty, amid whatever simplicity of manners, how- 
ever unconscious of it themselves, they brought the 
immanent moral life which had made the morasses at 
the mouth of the Rhine the centre of a traffic more 
wide and lucrative, the scene of a history more majes- 
tic, than Europe before had ever seen, and the seat of 
the first enlightened Republic on all the circuit of its 
maritime coast. 

To these two elements, the English and the Dutch, 
was added a vivid and graceful force by those who came 
from the fruitful Protestant provinces of France. It is 
sometimes forgotten that the Huguenots constituted 
the larger and wealthier part of the population of New 
Amsterdam, after the Dutch ; so that La Montaigne 
had been in a measure associated with Kieft in the gov- 
ernment here, as early as 1638 ; so that public docu- 
ments, before 1664, were ordered to be printed in the 
French language, as well as in the Dutch. They 
brought with them industry, arts, refinement of letters, 
as well as the faithful and fervent spirit which had 
been infused into them in the chambres ardentes of 
their long persecutions. 

They Vv^ere, probably, more generally a cultivated 
class than were the colonists from either England or 

soon built ; and the roof was raised, and covered by English carpenters 
with oak shingles, which, by exposure to the weather, soon ' looked like 
slate.' " 

Brodhead's Hist, of New York. Vol. I., pp. 336-7. 



Huguenot movement in France, 

Holland. The Huguenot movement had begun in 
France, not among the poorer people, but in the capi- 
tal, and in the university. The revival of letters had 
given it primary impulse. It was scholastic, as well 
as devout, and so was fitly signaled and served by the 
most philosophical system of theology elaborated in 
Europe. Its ministers were among the most learned 
and eloquent in that country and century of eloquent 
preachers. It had counted distinguished nobles in its 
ranks ; Conde, and Coligni, among its leaders. Mar- 
guerite, Queen of Navarre, had been in her time the 
centre of it. It was intimately connected with the 
high politics of the realm. It had control of abundant 
wealth. The commerce of the kingdom, and its finest 
manufactures, were largely in the hands of those who 
composed the eight hundred Huguenot churches found 
in France in the early part of the seventeenth century. 
The families of this descent who were early in New 
York — some of them as early as 1625 — and who were 
afterward in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, 
South Carolina, brought with them thus an ancestral 
influence of education, refinement, and skillful enter- 
prise, as well as of religious fidelity. The French vivacity 
blended in them with a quick and careful sense of duty. 
They brought new arts, and graceful industries, a cer- 
tain chivalric and cultivated tone ; while the right to 
freedom, in the v/orship of God, and in the conduct of 
civil affairs, was as dear to them as to any of those v/hose 
fortunes they shared. This spirit had compelled respect 

SI 



Address. 

in the land which they left, from those who hated it 
most intensely. For nearly ninety years it had made it 
indispensable to maintain there the edict which secured 
to them religious rights. When that w^as repealed, 
with the frightful dragonnades which met such ghastly 
retribution in the streets of Paris, a hundred yeaj's after, 
half-a-million of the citizens of France pushed across 
its guarded frontiers into voluntary exile, while the 
fiery spirit of those who remained blazed forth in the 
war of the Camisards, unextinguished among the Cev- 
ennes for twenty years. 

Such an element of population was powerful, here, 
beyond its numbers. Its trained vitality made it effi- 
cient. It is a familiar fact that of the seven Presidents 
of the Continental Congress, three were of this Hugue- 
not lineage : Boudinot, Laurens, and John Jay. Of 
the four commissioners who signed the provisional 
treaty at Paris, which assured our independence, two 
were of the same number : Laurens, and Jay. Faneuil, 
whose hall in Boston has been for more than a hundred 
years the rallying-place of patriotic enthusiasm, w^as the 
son of a Huguenot. Marion, the swamp-fox of Caro- 
lina, was another; Horry, another; Huger, another. 
It was a Huguenot voice, that of Duche, which open- 
ed with prayer the Continental Congress. It was a 
Huguenot hand, that of John Laurens, which drew the 
articles of capitulation at Yorktown. Between these 
two terminal acts, the brilliant and faithful bravery of 

the soldier had found wider imitation, among those of 
52 



The Swedish Emigration. 

his lineage, than had the cowardly weakness of the 
preacher; and two of those, who thirty years after, 
in 1 8 14, signed the treaty of peace at Ghent, were still 
of this remarkable stock — James Bayard, and Albert 
Gallatin. 

Whenever the history of those who came hither 
from La Rochelle, and the banks of the Garonne, is 
fully written, the value and the vigor of the force which 
they imparted to the early American public life will 
need no demonstration. 

The Swedes and Germans, who also were here, though 
in smaller numbers, represented the same essential tem- 
per, and were in radical harmony of spirit with those 
by whose side they found their place. Gustavus Vasa 
had given to Sweden comparative order, and initial 
prosperity ; leaving it, at his death, with various indus- 
tries, a considerable trade, and important institutions 
of education and religion. Gustavus Adolphus gave 
to the country thus partially regenerated an eminence 
as signal as it was brief in European affairs. A typi- 
cal Northman, with his fair skin, clear gray eyes, and 
the golden hair which crowned his gigantic stature, he 
broke upon Germany in the midst of the agony of 
its Thirty Years' War, beat back the imperial ban- 
ners from their near approach to the German Ocean, 
and, in two years of rapid victory, turned the entire 
current of the strife. He swept fortresses into his 
grasp, as the reaper binds his sheaves. The armies of 
Tilly were pulverized before him. He entered Munich 

?3 



Address. 

in triumph ; Nuremberg and Naumburg amid a wel- 
come that frightened him, it was so much like worship. 
And when he died, accidently killed in the fog at 
Llitzen, in 1632, he left the most signal example in 
modern times of heroic design, of far-sighted audacity, 
of the conquering force which lies in faith. 

When he left Sweden he said to his chancellor: 
" Henceforth there remains for me no rest, except the 
eternal ; " and it was true. But, before he left, he had 
not only founded a university at home, and given 
large impulse to industry and to commerce, but had 
chartered a colony for this country, with liberal pro- 
vision, and an unbounded faith and hope. After his 
death, the great minister, Oxenstiern — most prescient 
and masterful of the statesmen of the time — furthered 
the colony, and would have built it into greatness, but 
for the subsequent dechne of the kingdom, under the 
eccentric and self-willed Christina. Then it was ab- 
sorbed, as you know, by the Dutch. But so far as it 
contributed, as to some extent it did, to the early 
civilized life on these shores, it simply augmented the 
previous forces, of personal energy, public education, 
constructive skill, and a free faith, for which the woods 
had here retired to make room ; and the fact that it 
was planned by him whose flashing fame filled 
Europe with amaze, connects it with heroic memories, 
and casts a certain reflected splendor upon our early 
popular life. 

The Germans, who speedily followed the Swedes, 

54 



The German Emizration. 



&> 



though their large immigration was later in beginning, 
were of the same spirit. The war, which had covered 
a whole generation, in which three-fourths of the 
people had perished, and three-fourths of the houses 
had been destroyed, — which had given, as Archbishop 
Trench points out, the new word " plunder " to the 
English language,* and which had been marked by- 
atrocities so awful that history shudders to recite them, 
— had not, after all, exterminated the temper at which 
it was aimed. It had given, as Trench has also 
observed, the largest contribution of any period to 
the Protestant hymn-book of Germany. Those who 
survived it, while fiercer than ever against the tyran- 
nies which they had fought, were more eager than 
ever to replace the prosperities which the war had 
destroyed. The wilderness around them, which man 
had made, was less inviting than the wilderness beyond 
seas, which God had left for man to conquer. So 
they came hither; bringing with them the courage, 
the purpose, and the hope, which all the fire that ran 
along the ground, and the iron hail that had broken 
the branches of every tree, had only burned and 
beaten deeper into their minds. 

They came for expanded opportunity ; for liberty of 
development, and the chance of a more rewarding 

* " This War has left a very characteristic deposite in our langnage, 
in the word ' plunder,' which first appeared in English about the year 
1642-3, having- been brought hither from Germany by some of the many 
Scotch and English who had served therein ; for so Fuller assures us." 

Lect. on "Social Aspects of the Thirty Years' War," 

55 



Address. 

work. Wherever they touched the American coast 
they set the seeds of that new civilization which had 
found in Germany its early incentives, and for which 
they and their fathers had fought, through a strife 
without precedent in severity and in length. 

The same was true of the Scotch and Scotch-Irish, 
who came in rapidly increasing numbers after the 
close of the seventeenth century. The Earl of Stir- 
ling had received, by royal charter, as early as 162 1, a 
grant of the territory still known to the world as 
" Nova Scotia," and had subsequently sent some colo- 
nists to its shores ; but the small settlement soon disap- 
peared, and those who afterward emigrated from 
Scotland, for many years, were inclined to seek 
homes in the north of Ireland, rather than on these 
distant coasts. The comparatively few families from 
the lowland shires, who had come hither before 
1664, had mingled inseparably with the English emi- 
grants, whom they closely resemibled, and are scarcely 
to be discriminated from them.* 

The four or five hundred Scotch prisoners whom 
Cromwell sent to Boston, in 1651, after the battles of 
Dunbar and Worcester, were, of course, discontented 
in their involuntary exile, and appear to have left no' 

* " The population of Scotland (1603), with the exception of the 
Celtic tribes which were thinly scattered over the Hebrides, and over 
the mountainous parts of the northern shires, was of the same blood 
with the population of England, and spoke a tongue which did not differ 
from the purest English more than the dialects of Somersetshire and 
Lancashire differed from each other." 

Macaulay, History of England, vol. i, page 65. 
56 



The Scotch-Irish Emigration, 

permanent impression on the unfolding life of the 
colonies. When Robert Barclay, of Ury, was gov- 
ernor of New Jersey, in 1683, he secured the emigra- 
tion of numbers of his countrymen to that attractive 
and fertile province, though, it is said, " with some 
difficulty and importunity. For, although the great 
bulk of the nation was suffering the rigors of tyranny, 
for their resistance to the establishment of prelacy, they 
were reluctant to seek relief in exile from their 
native land." * 

But when the hundred and twenty families came, 
in 1 719, to Boston, Portland, and elsewhere, the an- 
cestors of whom, a century before, had emigrated from 
Argyleshire to Londonderry and Antrim in the north 
of Ireland, and by part of whom Londonderry, in New 
Hampshire, was speedily settled, — and when others 
followed, as to Georgia in 1736, to North Carolina in 
1746, to South CaroHna in 1763, — they came to stay. 
They changed their skies, but not their minds. They 
brought the exact and stern fidelity to religious con- 
viction, the national pride, the hatred of tyranny, the 
frugal, hardy, courageous temper which were to them 
an ancestral inheritance. Their strong idiosyncrasy 
maintained itself stubbornly, but their practical spirit 
was essentially in harmony with that of the colonists 
who had preceded them ; and when the hour of sum- 
mons came, no voices were earlier or more emphatic 
for dissolving all connection with Great Britain than 

* Gordon's Histoiy of New Jersey, chap. IV. 

57 



Add^^ess, 

were those of the men whose ancestors, In 1638, had 
eagerly signed the " National Covenant " in the Grey- 
friars' church-yard, or forty years afterward had faced 
Claverhouse and his dragoons at Loudon-hill, or 
Monmouth and his troops at Bothwell-bridge. 

So, also, the Bohemian protestants, who were here 
in 1656 ; the Waldenses, who were on Staten Island 
and elsewhere in the same year ; the German quakers, 
by whom Germantown, in Pennsylvania, was settled, 
in 1 684 ; the three thousand Germans, sent out to the 
Hudson River in 1710, and who afterward established 
their prosperous homes at Schoharie, and along the 
inviting Mohawk meadows ; the Salzburg exiles, who 
had crossed Europe from Augsburg " singing psalms," 
and who finally found a home in Georgia, in 1 734 : — 
all were essentially similar in spirit, industrious, order- 
ly, devout, faithful to their religion, with a resolute 
purpose to live and work in unhindered freedom. 
Each small migration added its increment to the 
swelling force of the various but sympathetic popula- 
tion of the colonies. Each element had its separate 
value, its proper strength ; and all were ready, when 
the final fires of war broke forth, to combine with each 
other, as the many metals, fused together and inti- 
mately commingling, were wrought into one magnifi- 
cent amalgam, in the famous and precious Corinthian 
brass. 

Even the rough and rapid outline of this fragment- 
ary review illustrates the extent to which the century 



The Natioji commenced. 

passing so signally over Europe impressed its charac- 
ter on this continent. Twenty-five years after New 
Amsterdam had been submitted to the English, at 
least two hundred thousand Europeans are computed 
to have had their home in this country, representing, 
for the most part, the several peoples which I have 
named. The future Nation w^as then fully commenced. 
It had only thenceforth to work, and grow. It was 
formed of plain people. Its wealth was small, and its 
culture not great. It had been hardly noticed, at first, 
amid the swift changes of states and dynasties with 
which Europe was dazzled. But the forces which it 
contained represented an illustrious ancestry. It is no 
exaggeration to say that the most energetic life of the 
world, up to that era, was reproduced in it. We have 
thought of it, too commonly, as composed of men who 
had simply corne here in zeal for an opinion, or to 
escape the fierce inquest of tyranny. It was a broader 
temper which brought them, an ampler purpose 
which they came to serve. The push of a century was 
behind them ; eager, aggressive, sweeping out to new 
conquests on unknown coasts. It had seen such 
changes in Northern Europe as only its vehement 
energy could have wrought ; and now, with seemingly 
careless hand, using the impulse of various motives, it 
had flung into space a separate people, infused with its 
temper, alive with its force. 

In its constituent moral life, that people was one, 
though gradually formed, and drawn from regions so 

59 



Address. 

remote. It was fearless, reflective, energetic, constmc- 
tive, by its birthright ; at once industrious and martial ; 
intensely practical, politically active, religiously free. 
There was, almost, a monotony of force in it. It 
accepted no hereditary leaders, and kept those whom 
it elected within careful limitations. It gave small 
promise of esthetic sensibility, with the dainty touch 
of artistic taste ; but it showed from the outset a swift 
and far-sighted common-sense. It was vital with ex- 
pectation ; having the strongest ancestral attachments, 
yet attracted by the Future more than by the Past, 
and always looking to new success and larger work. 
It was hospitable, of course, to all new comers, giving 
reception in New England, as well as here, to even 
the Jesuit and his mass; * but it absorbed only what 
harmonized with it, was indifferent to the rest. It 
was sensible of God, and His providence over it ; but 
entirely aware of the value of possessions, and pro- 
foundly resolved to have the power which they impart. 
It was the heir to a great Past. It had before it the 
perilous uncertainties of an obscure Future. But any 
philosopher, considering it at that point, with a mind 
as intent and reflective as Burke's, would have said, I 
think, without hesitation, that its Future must respond 
to the long preparation ; that the times before it must 
match the times out of which it had come, and take 
impress from the lands whose tongues and temper it 
combined. If that strong stock, selected from so 

* See Parkman's " Jesuits of North America," pp. 322-327. 



The Training of the Nation. 

many peoples, and transferred to this continent at 
that critical time, was not destined thenceforth to 
grow, till the little one became a thousand, and the 
small one a strong nation, there is no province for 
anticipation in public aifairs, and " the philosophy of 
history " is a phrase without meaning. 

The after-training which met it here was precisely 
such, you instantly observe, as befitted its origin, and 
carried on the development which was prophesied in 
its nature. It was an austere, protracted training ; not 
beautiful, but beneficent ; of labor, patience, legislation, 
war. As the colonies had been planted according 
to the wise maxim of Bacon — " the people wherewith 
you plant ought to be gardeners, ploughmen, laborers, 
smiths, carpenters, joiners, fishermen, fowlers, with 
some few apothecaries, surgeons, cooks, and bakers," * 
— so they were trained for practical service, for long 
endurance, for the arts of industry not of beauty, for 
ultimate oneness as a Nation, and a powerful impres- 
sion upon mankind. 

Incessant labor was their primary teacher ; universal 
in its demands, in effect most salutary. If they had 
been idle men, supplied with abundant resources from 
abroad, a something mystical and dark would have 
penetrated their spirit, from the pathless forests which 
Stretched around, from the lonely seas which lay behind, 
from the fierceness of the elements, from their sense 
of dislocation from all familiar historic lands. There 

* Essay xxxiii. ; " of Plantations." 

6i 



Addi^ess. 

was, in fact, something of this. Certain passages in 
their history, certain parts of their writings, are only 
explained by it. It would have been general, and 
have wrought a sure public decline, except for the 
constant corrective of their labor. They would have 
seen, oftener than they did, phantom armies fighting 
in the clouds, fateful omens in aurora and comet.* The 
dread of witchcraft, still prevalent in the old world, 
would more widely have fevered their minds. The 
voice of demons would have oftener been heard, in 
the howl of wolves, or the winds wailing among the 
pines. But the sweat of their brows medicined their 
minds. The work which was set for them was too 
difficult and vast to allow such tendencies to get 
domination. 

A continent was before them to be subdued, and 
with few and poor instruments. With axe and hoe, 
mattock and plough, they were to conquer an unde- 
fined wilderness, untouched, till then, by civilized in- 
dustry ; with no land behind to which to retreat, 
with only the ocean and the sand-hills in the rear. 

It was a tremendous undertaking ; greater than any 

* " The Aurora Borealis, the beauty of the northern sky, which is now 
gazed upon with so much delight, was seen for the first time in New 
England in 1721, and filled the inhabitants with alarm. Superstition be- 
held with terror its scarlet hues, and transformed its waving folds of 
light, moving like banners along the sky, into harbingers of coming 
judgment, and omens of impending havoc. Under its brilliant reflection, 
the snow, the trees, and every object, seemed to be dyed with blood, and 
glowed like fire." 

Barstow's Hist, of New Hampshire, chap. vii. 
62 



The Continent to be subdued. 

infant people had ever encountered ; greater, fortunate- 
ly, than they themselves knew at the time. Plutarch 
tells us that Stasicrates once proposed to Alexander 
to have Mount Athos carved into a statue of himself ; 
a copious river flowing from one hand, and a city of 
thousands of people in the other ; the ^Egean archi- 
pelago stretching outward from the feet. Even the 
ambition which decreed Alexandria, and made Asia 
its vassal, might have pleased itself with a fancy so 
colossal. But it was trifling, compared with the work 
which the colonists of this country were called to take 
up ; as a Macedonian bay, compared with the ocean 
on which their rugged continent looked. Upon that 
continent they were to impress the likeness of them- 
selves. What Europe had only partially realized, after 
its centuries of advancing civilization, they and their 
children were suddenly to repeat, fashioning the wil- 
derness to the home of commonwealths. 

The strain of the work was prodigious and unceas- 
ing. No wonder that the applications of science have 
always had a charm for Americans ! No wonder that 
" impossible " has ever since seemed here a foolish word ! 
But the muscle which was built, in both body and 
will, was as tough and tenacious as the work was 
enormous. 

They had to secure, — by invention, where English 
pohcy permitted, by purchase, where it did not, — what- 
ever they needed for the comfort of life, and whatever 

means of culture they possessed. Their fisheries were 

63 



Address. 

pushed along the jagged, tempestuous coasts, till they 
struck the icy barriers of the pole. Their commerce 
was cultivated, against the jealousy of the English legis- 
lation, till, in Burke's time, you see to what it had 
grown. They had to establish their own free schools ; 
to found and enlarge their needed colleges ; to supply 
themselves with such literature at home as could be 
produced, in the pauses of their prodigious labor ; to 
import from the old world what their small means en- 
abled them to buy. 

They had their chartered liberties to maintain, against 
Royal hostility, in the face of governors who hindered 
and threatened, if they did not — like Andros — compel 
the clerks of their assemblies to write " Finis" midway 
on the records. '^" So it happened to them, according to 
Milton's ideal plan for a perfect education. " The next 
remove," he says, " must be to the study of politics ; 
to know the beginning, end, and reason of political 
societies ; that they may not, in a dangerous fit of the 
Commonwealth, be such poor, shaken, uncertain reeds, 
of such a tottering conscience, as many of our great 
counselors have lately showed themselves, but stead- 
fast pillars of the State." The plain men who had 
come here from Europe, and who had before them a 

*'*His Excellency, Sir Edmund Andros, Knight, Captain-General 
and Governor of his Majesty's Territory and Dominion in New England, 
by order from his Majesty, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 
the 31st of October, 1687, took into his hands the government of this 
colony of Connecticut, it being by his Majesty annexed to the Massachu- 
setts and other Colonies, under his Excellency's government. FINIS." 

Secretary's Allyn's record ; quoted by Palfrey, vol. 3, p. 545. 
64 



Military training of the Colonists. 

wilderness to be conquered, were trained according to 
this generous philosophy. A large practical sover- 
eignty had to be in their hands, from the beginning, for 
their self-preservation. They established offices, enacted 
laws, organized a militia, waged war, coined money ; 
and the lessons which they learned, of legislative 
prudence, administrative skill, bore abundant fruit in 
that final Revolution which did not spring from 
accident or from passion, which v/as born of debate, 
which was shaped by ideas, and which vindicated 
itself by majestic State-papers. 

Their military tuition was as constant as their work. 
Against the Indians, against the French, somewhere 
or other, as we look back, they seem to have been always 
in arms — so uncertain and brief were their intervals 
of peace. Not always threatened violence to them- 
selves, sometimes the remote collisions and entangle- 
ments of European politics, involved them in these 
wars — as in that great one which commenced in the 
question of the Austrian Succession, and which swept 
through our untrodden woods its trail of fire ; when, 
as Macaulay says of Frederick, " that he might rob a 
neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men 
fought on the coasts of Coromandel, and red men 
scalped each other by the great lakes of North 
America." Precisely as the colonies grew, any power 
hostile to Great Britain was incited to attack them. 
At some point or other, therefore, the straggling 

and interrupted line of their scanty possessions was 

65 



Address. 

lighted with conflagration, vocal with volleys, drip- 
ping with blood, down almost to the day of the Revo- 
lution. 

But from this incessant martial training came prac- 
tised skill in the use of weapons, a cool courage, a 
supreme self-reliance, — the temper which looks from 
many portraits, which faced emergencies without a 
fear, and whose fire withered the British ranks at 
Concord-bridge and on Breed's-hill. 

There is not much that is picturesque in the annals 
which cover the hundred years after New Amsterdam 
became New York. They look, to the world, perhaps 
to us, for the most part, common-place. Volcanic 
regions are the more picturesque in landscape forms, 
because of the sudden violence of the forces which 
have shattered and reset them. The legends cling to 
rugged peaks. The pinnacles of Pilatus incessantly 
attract them, while they slide from the smoother slopes 
of Righi. So a convulsive and violent history, full 
of reaction, fracture, catastrophe, appeals to the imag- 
ination as one never does that is quiet and gradual, 
where a people moves forward in steady advance, and 
the sum of its accomplishment is gradually built of 
many particulars. There was not much in the career 
of the colonists, in the hundred years before the 
Revolution, which poetry would be moved to cele- 
brate, or whose attractive pictorial aspects the painter 
would make haste to sketch. 

But the discipline answered its purpose better than 

66 ; . . 



The severe Discipline salutary, 

if it had been pictorial, tragic. It was apt to the in- 
born temper of the colonists. It fortified in them 
that hardy and resolute moral life which they had 
brought. It guarded the forces which were their birth- 
right from waste and loss. The colony of Surinam, 
under tropical skies — where mahogany was a firewood, 
and the Tonquin-bean, with its swift sweetness, per- 
fumed the air; where sugar and spices are produced 
without limit, and coffee and cotton have returned 
to the planter two crops a year— this seemed, at the 
time, a prodigal recompense for the colony of New 
Netherland. But Guiana demoralized the men who 
possessed it ; while the harder work, under harsher 
heavens, gave an empire to those who adhered to these 
coasts. No unbought luxuries became to them as 
dazzling and deadly Sabine gifts. No lazy and volup- 
tuous life, as of tropical islands, dissolved their man- 
hood. Their little wealth was wrested from the 
wilderness, or won from the seas ; and the cost of its 
acquirement measured its permanence. They were, as 
a people, honest and chaste, because they were workers. 
Their ways might be rough, their slang perhaps strong. 
But no prevalence among them of a prurient fiction 
inflamed their passions ; no fescennine plays blanched 
the bloom of their modesty. Their discipline was 
Spartan, not Athenian ; but it made their life robust 
and sound. The sharp hellebore cleansed their heads 
for a more discerning practical sense. They never had 

to meet what Carlyle declares the present practi- 

67 



Address. 

cal problem of governments : " given, 
knaves, to educe an honesty from their united ac- 
tion." 

As their numbers increased, and their industry be- 
came various, the sense of independence on foreign 
countries was constantly nurtured. The feeling of in- 
ward likeness and sympathy among themselves, the 
tendencies to combine in an organic union, grew al- 
ways more earnest. Patriotism was intensified into a 
passion ; since, if any people owned their lands, cer- 
tainly they did, who had hewn out their spaces amid 
the woods, had purchased them not with wampum 
but with work, had fertilized them with their own 
blood. And, at last, trained by labor and by war, by edu- 
cational influences. Christian teachings, legislative re- 
sponsibilities, commercial success, — -at last, the spirit 
which they had brought, which in Europe had been re- 
sisted and thwarted until its force was largely broken, 
but which here had not died, and had not declined, but 
had continued diffused as a common life among them 
all, — this made their separate establishment in the world 
a necessity of the time. " Monarchy unaccountable is 
the worst sort of tyranny, and least of all to be endured by 
free-born men " — that was a maxim of Aristotle's poli- 
tics, twenty centuries before their Congress. It had been 
repeated and emphasized by Milton, while the ances- 
tors of those assembled in the Congress were fighting 
for freedom across the seas.* Holland had believed it, 

* Milton had added other words, in the same great discourse of Lib- 
68 



The fruit of the American Spirit. 

and protestant Germany, as well as England. It be- 
came the vivid and illuminating conviction of the 
people here gathered; and in its light the Republic 
dawned. The fore-gleams of that were playing already 
along the horizon, while Burke was speaking. Before 
his words had reached this country, the small red rim 
was palpable on the eastern sky, showing the irresisti- 
ble up-spring of that effulgent yet temperate day 
which never since has ceased to shine. 

All this was the work of that early distinctive Amer- 
ican Spirit, so rich in its history, so manifold in its 
sources, so supreme in its force. It had not been 
born of sudden passion. It was not the creature of 
one school of theology. It had had no narrow insu- 
lar origin. It was richer and broader than Burke 
himself discerned it to be. Holland and France, 
as well as England, had contributed to it. From the 
age of Elizabeth, and of William the Silent, of Henry 
Fourth and Gustavus Adolphus, it had burst forth upon 
these shores. It had here been working for a century 
and a half, before the Stamp Act. It had wrought in 

erty, which might have served as a motto for the Congress convened at 
Philadelphia, just a hundred years after his death : 

" And surely they that shall boast, as we do, to be a free nation, and 
not to have in themselves the power to remove or to abolish any governor, 
supreme or subordinate, with the government itself upon urgent causes, 
may please their fancy with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to cozen 
babies, but are indeed under tyranny and servitude, as wanting that power , 
which is the root and source of all liberty, to dispose and economize in 
the land which God hath given them, as masters of family in their own 
house and free inheritance." 

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. 

69 



Address, 

Europe for three generations, before the first hemlock 
hut sheltered a white face between Plymouth and 
Jamestown. It had been born of vehement struggle, 
vast endurance, sublime aspiration, heroic achievement : 
and on this reserved continent of the future God gave 
it room, incentive, training. Assault did not destroy it 
here. Reaction did not waste it. It flourished more 
royally, because transplanted. At last it sent back of 
its inherent, perennial life, to revive the lands from 
which at the outset it had come. 

The work of that spirit is what we inherit. It was 
that which got its coveted relief from paying three- 
pence a pound upon tea, by erecting another empire 
in the world. It was that which counseled, wrought, 
and fought, from the first Congress to the last capitula- 
tion. It is that which every succeeding reminiscence, 
in the coming crowded centennial years, will constant- 
ly recall. It is that which interlinks our annals with 
those of the noblest time in Europe, and makes us 
heirs to the greatness of its history. It is that which 
showstheprovidenceof Himwho isthe eternal Master- 
builder of states and peoples, and the reach of whose 
plan runs through the ages ! 

The patriot's duty, the scholar's mission, the phil- 
anthropist's hope, are illustrated by it. For as long as 
this spirit survives among us, uncorrupted by luxury, 
unabated by time, no matter what the strife of parties, 
no matter what the commercial reverse, institutions 
which express it will be permanent here as the moun- 

70 



May it be enduring / 

tains and the stars. When this shall fail, if fail it does, 
it will not need a foreign foe, it will not ask domestic 
strife, to destroy our liberties. Of themselves they will 
fall; as the costly column, whose base has rotted; as 
the mighty frame, whose life has gone ! 

May He who brought it, still maintain it : — that 
when others are gathered here, a hundred years hence, 
to review the annals not yet written, they may have 
only to trace the unfolding of its complete and 
sovereign life ! 

71 



THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, 
AND THE EFFECTS OF IT. 



OR ATI ON. 



Mr. President: Fellow- Citizens :— 

The long-expected day has come, and, passing 
peacefully the impalpable line which separates ages, 
the Republic completes its hundredth year. The 
predictions in which affectionate hope gave inspi- 
ration to political prudence are fulfilled. The fears 
of the timid, and the hopes of those to whom our 
national existence is a menace, are alike disappointed. 
The fable of the physical world becomes the fact of 
the political ; and after alternate sunshine and storm, 
after heavings of the earth which only deepened 
its roots, and ineffectual blasts of lightning whose 
lurid threat died in the air, under a sky now raining 
on it benignant influence, the century-plant of Amer- 
ican Independence and popular Government bursts 
into this magnificent blossom, of a joyful celebration 
illuminating the land ! 

With what desiring though doubtful expectation 
those whose action we commemorate looked for the 
possible coming of this day, we know from the 

5 



Oration at New York. 

records which they have left. With what anxious 
soHcitude the statesmen and the soldiers of the fol- 
lowing generation anticipated the changes which 
might take place before this centennial year should 
be reached, we have heard ourselves, in their great 
and fervent admonitory words. How dim and drear 
the prospect seemed to our own hearts fifteen years 
since, when, on the fourth of July, 1861, the Thirty- 
seventh Congress met at Washington with no repre- 
sentative in either house from any State south of 
Tennessee and Western Virginia, and when a deter- 
mined arid numerous army, under skillful command- 
ers, approached and menaced the Capital and the 
Government, — this we surely have not forgotten ; 
nor how, in the terrible years which followed, the 
blood and fire, and vapor of smoke, seemed often- 
times to swim as a sea, or to rise as a wall, between 
our eyes and this anniversary. 

' It cannot outlast the second generation from 
those who founded it' was the exulting conviction 
of the many who loved the traditions and state of 
monarchy, and who felt them insecure before the 
widening fame in the world of our prosperous Re- 
public. ' It may not reach its hundredth year ' was 
the deep and sometimes the sharp apprehension 
of those who felt, as all of us felt, that their own 
liberty, welfare, hope, with the brightest political 
promise of the world, were bound up with the unity 
and the life of our nation. Never was solicitude 



Deliverance of the Nation. 

more intense, never was prayer to Almighty God 
more fervent and constant — not in the earliest be- 
ginnings of our history, when Indian ferocity threat- 
ened that history with a swift termination, not in the 
days of supremest trial amid the Revolution — than 
in those years when the nation seemed suddenly 
split asunder, and forces which had been combined 
for its creation were clenched and rocking back and 
forth in bloody grapple on the question of its main- 
tenance. 

The prayer was heard. The effort and the sacri- 
fice have come to their fruitage ; and to-day the 
nation — still one, as at the start, though now ex- 
panded over such immense spaces^ absorbing such 
incessant and diverse elements from other lands, de- 
veloping within it opinions so conflicting, interests 
so various, and forms of occupation so novel and 
manifold — to-day the nation, emerging from the toil 
and the turbulent strife, with the earlier and the later 
clouds alike swept out of its resplendent stellar arch, 
pauses from its work to remember and rejoice ; with 
exhilarated spirit to anticipate its future ; with rever- 
ent heart to offer to God its great Te Deum. 

Not here alone, in this great city, whose lines have 
gone out into all the earth, and whose superb prog- 
ress in wealth, in culture, and in civic renown, is 
itself the most illustrious token of the power and 
beneficence of that frame of government under which 
it has been realized ; not alone in yonder, I had 



Oration at New York. 

almost said adjoining, city, whence issued the paper 
that first announced our national existence, and 
where now rises the magnificent Exposition, testi- 
fying for all progressive States to their respect and 
kindness toward us, the radiant clasp of diamond 
and opal on the girdle of the sympathies which inter- 
weave their peoples with ours ; not alone in Boston, 
the historic town, first in resistance to British aggres- 
sion, and foremost in plans for the new and popular 
organization, one of whose citizens wrote his name, 
as if cutting it with a plough-share, at the head of all 
on our great charter, another of whose citizens weis 
its intrepid and powerful champion, aiding its passage 
through the Congress ; not there alone, nor yet in 
other great cities of the land, but in smaller towns, 
in villages and hamlets, this day will be kept, a 
secular Sabbath, sacred alike to memory and to hope. 
Not only, indeed, where men are assembled, as 
we are here, will it be honored. The lonely and 
remote will have their part in this commemoration. 
Where the boatman follows the winding stream, or 
the woodman explores the forest shades ; where the 
miner lays down his eager drill beside rocks which 
guard the precious veins ; or where the herdsman, 
along the sierras, looks forth on the seas which now 
reflect the rising day, which at our midnight shall be 
gleaming like gold in the setting sun, — there also 
will the day be regarded, as a day of memorial. The 
sailor on the sea will note it, and dress his ship in 



The Day Widely Recognized. 

its brightest array of flags and bunting. Americans 
dwelling in foreign lands will note and keep it. 

London itself will to-day be more festive because 
of the event which a century ago shadowed its streets, 
incensed its Parliament, and tore from the crown of 
its obstinate King the chiefest jewel. On the boule- 
vards of Paris, in the streets of Berlin, and along the 
leveled bastions of Vienna, at Marseilles and at Flor- 
ence, upon the silent liquid ways of stately Venice, 
in the passes of the Alps, under the shadow of church 
and obelisk, palace and ruin, which still prolong the 
majesty of Rome ; yea, further East, on the Bospho- 
rus, and in Syria; in Egypt, which writes on the 
front of its compartment in the great Exhibition, 
" The oldest people of the world sends its morning- 
greeting to the youngest nation ;" along the heights 
behind Bombay, in the foreign hongs of Canton, in 
the *' Islands of the Morning," which found the dawn 
of their new age in the startling sight of an American 
squadron entering their bays — everywhere will be 
those who have thought of this day, and who join 
with us to greet its coming. 

No other such anniversary, probably, has attracted 
hitherto such general notice. You have seen Rome, 
perhaps, on one of those shining April days when the 
traditional anniversary of the founding of the city fills 
its streets with civic processions, with military display, 
and the most elaborate fire-works in Europe ; you 
may have seen Holland, in 1872, when the whole 



Oration at New York. 

country bloomed with orange on the three-hundredth 
anniversary of the capture by the sea-beggars of the 
cty of Briel, and of the revolt against Spanish domi- 
nation which thereupon flashed on different sides 
into sudden explosion. But these celebrations, and 
others like them, have been chiefly local. The world 
outside has taken no wide impression from them. 
Ihis of ours is the first of which many lands, in dif- 
ferent tongues, will have had report. Partly because 
the world is narrowed in our time, and its distant 
peoples are made neighbors, by the fleeter machine- 
ries now in use; partly because we have drawn so 
many to our population from foreign lands, while the 
restless and acquisitive spirit of our people has made 
them at home on every shore; but partly, also, and 
e^ssentially, because of the nature and the relations of 
that event which we commemorate, and of the influ 
ence exerted by it on subsequent history, the at 
tention of men is more or less challenged, in every 
centre of commerce and of thought, by this anni- 
versary. 

Indeed it is not unnatural to feel-certainly it is 
not irreverent to feel-that they who by wisdom, by 
valor, and by sacrifice, have contributed to perfect 
and maintain the institutions which we possess, and 
have added by death as well as by life to the lustre 
of our history, must also have an interest in this day • 
that in their timeless habitations they remember us 
beneath the lower circle of the heavens, are ^lad in 

TO O ■"' 



Unseen Spectators. 

our joy, and share and lead our grateful praise. To a 
spirit alive with the memories of the time, and rejoic- 
ing in its presage of nobler futures, recalling the great, 
the beloved, the heroic, who have labored and joy- 
fully died for its coming, it will not seem too fond an 
enthusiasm to feel that the air is quick with shapes 
we cannot see, and glows with faces whose light 
serene we may not catch ! They who counseled in 
the Cabinet, they who defined and settled the law in 
decisions of the Bench, they who pleaded ^\nth mighty 
eloquence in the Senate, they who poured out their 
souls in triumphant effusion for the liberty which they 
loved in forum or pulpit, they who gave their young 
and glorious life as an offering on the field, that gov- 
ernment for the people, and by the people, might not 
perish from the earth — it cannot be but that they too 
have part and place in this Jubilee of our history ! 
God make our doings not unworthy of such spec- 
tators ! and make our spirit sympathetic with theirs 
from whom all selfish passion and pride have now 
forever passed away ! 

The interest which is felt so distinctly and widely 
in this anniversary reflects a light on the greatness 
of the action which it commemorates. It shows that 
we do not unduly exaggerate the significance or the 
importance of that ; that it had really large, even 
world-wide relations, and contributed an effective and 
a valuable force to the furtherance of the cause of 
freedom, education^ humane institutions, and popular 



^ Oration at New York. 

advancement, wherever its influence has been felt. 
j Yet when we consider the action itself, it may easily 
seem but slight in its nature, as it" was certainly 
commonplace in its circumstances/ There was 
nothing even picturesque in its surroundings, to 
enlist for it the pencil of the painter, or help to fix 
any luminous image of that which- was done on 
the popular memory. 

In this respect it is singularly contracted with other 
great and kindred events in general" history ; with 
those heroic and fruitful actions in English history 
which had especially prepared the way for it, and 
with which the thoughtful student of the past will 
always set it in intimate relations. Its utter simplicity, 
as compared with their splendor, becomes impressive.' 
When, five centuries and a half before, on the 
fifteenth of June, and the following days, in the year 
of our Lord 121 5, the English barons met King John 
in the long meadow of Runnemede, and forced from 
him the Magna Charta-the strong foundation and 
steadfast bulwark of English liberty, concerning 
which Mr. Hallam has said in our own time that -aH 
which has been since obtained is little more than as 
confirmation or commentary, "-no circumstance was 
wanting, of outward pageantry, to give dignity, 
brilliance, impressiveness, to the scene. On the one 
side was the King, with the Bishops and nobles who 
attended him, with the Master of the Templars, and 
the Papal legate before whom he had lately rendered 

TO 



Magna Charta. 

his homage.* On the other side was the great and 
determined majority of the barons of England, with 
mukitudes of knights, armed vassals, and retainers. + 
With them in purpose, and in resolute zeal, were 
most of those who attended the King. Stephen 
Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the 
English clergy, was with them ; the Bishops of Lon- 
don, Winchester, Lincoln, Rochester, and of other 
great sees. The Earl of Pembroke, dauntless and 
wise, of vast and increasing power in the realm, and 
not long after to be its Protector, was really at 
their head. Robert Fitz- Walter, whose fair daughter 
Matilda the profligate king had forcibly abducted, 
was Marshal of the army — the " Army of God, and 
the Holy Church." William Longsword, Earl of 
Salisbury, half-brother of the King, was on the 
field ; the Earls of Albemarle, Arundel, Gloucester, 
Hereford, Norfolk, Oxford, the great Earl Warenne, 
who claimed the same right of the sword in his barony 
which William the Conqueror had had in the king- 
dom, the Constable of Scotland, Hubert de Burgh, 

* May 15, A.D. 1213. 

t " Quant a ceux qui se trouvaient du cote des barons, il n'est ni 
necessaire ni possible de les enumerer, puisque toute la noblesse d'- 
Angleterre reunie en un seul corps, ne pouvait tomber sous le calcul. 
Lorsque les ^pretentions des revokes eurent ete debattues, le roi Jean, 
coTiprenant son inferiorite vis-a-vis des forces de ses barons, accorda 
sans resistance les lois et libertes qu'on lui demandait, et les confirma 
par la charte." 

Chronique de Matt. Paris, trad, par A. Huillard-Breholles, Tome 
Troisieme, pp. 6, 7, 

13 



Oratio7i at New York. 

seneschal of Polctou, and many other powerful 
nobles, — descendants of the daring soldiers whose 
martial valor had mastered England, Crusaders who 
had followed Richard at Ascalon and at Jaffa, whose 
own liberties had since been in mortal peril. Some 
burgesses of London were present, as well ; trouba- 
dours, minstrels, and heralds were not wanting ; and 
doubtless there mingled with the throng those skillful 
clerks whose pens had drawn the great instrument of 
freedom, and whose training in language had given 
a remarkable precision to its exact clauses and cogent 
terms. 

Pennons and banners streamed at large, and spear- 
heads gleamed, above the host. The June sunshine 
flashed reflected from inlaid shield and mascled 
armor. The terrible quivers of English yeomen 
hung on their shoulders. The voice of trumpets, and 
clamoring bugles, was in the air. The whole scene 
was vast as a battle, though bright as a tournament ; 
splendid, but threatening, like burnished clouds, in 
which lightnings sleep. The king, one of the hand- 
somest men of the time, though cruelty, perfidy, and 
every foul passion must have left their traces on his 
face, was especially fond of magnificence in dress ; 
wearing, we are told, on one Christmas occasion, a 
rich mantle of red satin, embroidered with sapphires 
and pearls, a tunic of white damask, a girdle lustrous 
with precious stones, and a baldric from his shoulder,. 

crossing his breast, set with diamonds and emeralds, 
14 



The Brilliant Pmiorama. 

while even his gloves, as indeed is still indicated on 
his fine effigy in Worcester cathedral, bore similar 
ornaments, the one a ruby, the other a sapphire. 

Whatever was superb, therefore, in that consum- 
mate age of royal and baronial state, whatever was 
splendid in the glittering and grand apparatus of 
chivalry, whatever was impressive in the almost more 
than princely pomp of prelates of the Church, — 

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 
And all that beauty, all that wealth can give, — 

all this was marshalled on that historic plain in 

Surrey, where John and the barons faced each other, 

where Saxon king and Saxon earl had met in council 

before the Norman had footing in England ; and all 

combined to Pfive a fit maofnificence of scttino^ to the 

great charter there granted and sealed. 

The tower of Windsor — not of the present castle 

and palace, but of the earlier detached fortress which 

already crowned the cliff, and from which John 

had come to the field — looked down on the scene. 

On the one side, low hills enclosed the meadow ; 

on the other, the Thames flowed brightly by, seeking 

the capital and the sea. Every feature of the scene 

was English, save one ; but over all loomed, in 

a portentous and haughty stillness, in the ominous 

presence of the envoy from Rome, that ubiquitous 

power, surpassing all others, which already had once 

laid the kingdom under interdict, and had exiled John 

from church and throne, but to which later he had 

15 



Oration at New York. 

been reconciled, and on which now he secretly relied 
to annul the charter which he was granting. 

The brilliant panorama illuminates the page which 
bears its story. It rises still as a vision before one, 
as he looks on the venerable parchment originals, 
preserved to our day in the British Museum. If it be 
true, as Hallam has said, that from that era a new soul 
was infused into the people of England, it must be 
confessed that the place, the day, and all the circum- 
stances of that new birth were fittinsf to the orreat 
and the vital event. 

That age passed away, and its peculiar splendor of 
aspect was not thereafter to be repeated. Yet when, 
four hundred years later, on the seventh of June,* 
1628, the Petition of Right, the second charter of the 
liberties of England, was finally presented by Parlia- 
ment to Charles the First, the scene and its accesso- 
ries were hardly less impressive. 

* Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles L, 1628-9. 

Rushworth's Hist. Coll, Charles I , p. 625. 

It is rather remarkable that neither Hume, Clarendon, Hallam, De 
Lolme, nor Macaulay, mentions this date, though all recognize the capi- 
tal importance of the event. It does not appear in even Knight's Popu- 
lar History of England. Miss Aikip, in her Memoirs of the Court of 
Charles I., gives it as June 8, (Vol. I, p. 216) ; and Chambers' Encyclo- 
paedia, which ought to be careful and accurate in regard to the dates ol 
events in English history, says, under the title ' Petition of Rights :' " At 
length, on both Houses of Parliament insisting on a fuller answer, he 
pronounced an unqualified assent in the usual form of words, ' Soit fait 
comme il est desire,' on the 26th of June, 1628." The same statement 
is repeated in the latest Revised Edition of that Encyclopedia. Lingard 

gives the date correctly. 
16 



The Petition of Right. 

Into that law — called a Petition, as if to mask the 
deadly energy of its blow upon tyranny — had been 
collected by the skill of its framers all the heads of 
the despotic prerogative which Charles had exer- 
cised, that they might all be smitten together, with 
one tremendous destroying stroke. The king, en- 
throned in his chair of state, looked forth on those 
who waited for his word, as still he looks, with his 
fore-casting and melancholy face, from the canvas of 
Van Dyck. Before him were assembled the nobles 
of England, in peaceful array, and not in armor, but 
with a civil power in their hands which the older 
gauntlets could not have held, and with the mem- 
ories of a lono- renown almost as visible to them- 

o 

selves and to the king as were the tapestries sus- 
pended on the walls. 

Crowding the bar, behind these descendants of the 
earlier barons, were the members of the House of 
Commons, with whom the law now presented to the 
king had had its origin, and whose boldness and tena- 
city had constrained the peers, after vain endeavor to ' 
modify its provisions, to accept them as they stood. 
They were the most powerful body of representatives 
of the kingdom that had yet been convened ; pos- 
sessing a private wealth, it was estimated, surpassing 
three-fold that of the Peers, and representing not 
less than they the best life, and the oldest lineage, of 
the kingdom which they loved. 

Their dexterous, dauntless, and far-sighted sagacity 

17 



Oration at New York, 

is yet more evident as we look back than their wealth 
or their breeding; and among them were men whose 
names will be familiar while Eno^land continues. 
Wentworth was there, soon to be the most danger- 
ous of traitors to the cause of which he was then the 
champion, but who then appeared as resolute as ever 
to vindicate the ancient, lawful, and vital liberties of 
the kingdom ; and Pym was there, the unsurpassed 
statesman, who, not long afterward was to warn the 
dark and haughty apostate that he never again would 
leave pursuit of him so long as his head stood on his 
shoulders.* Hampden was there, considerate and 
serene, but inflexible as an oak ; once imprisoned 
already for his resistance to an unjust taxation, and 
ready again to suffer and to conquer in the same 
supreme cause. Sir John Eliot was there, eloquent 
and devoted, who had tasted also the bitterness of 
imprisonment, and who, after years of its subsequent 
experience, was to die a martyr in the Tower. Coke 
was there, seventy-seven years of age, but full of fire 
as full of fame, whose vehement and unswerving 
hand had had chief part in framing the Petition, 
Selden was there, the repute of whose learning was 
alread)^ continental. Sir Francis Seymour, Sir Rob- 
ert Philips, Strode, Hobart, Denzil Holies, and Val- 
entine — such were the commoners ; and there, at 
the outset of a career not imagined by either, faced 
the king a silent young member who had come now 

* Welwoorl's Memorials, quoted in Forster's Life of Pym, p. 62. 
18 



The Seventh of y tine, 1628. 

to his first Parliament, at the age of twenty- nine, 
from the. borough of Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell. 

In a plain cloth suit he probably stood among his 
colleagues. But they were often splendid, and even 
sumptuous, in dress; with slashed doublets, and 
cloaks of velvet, with flowing collars of rich lace, the 
swords by their sides, in embroidered belts, with 
flashing hilts, their very hats jeweled and plumed, 
the abundant dressed and perfumed hair falling in 
curls upon their shoulders. Here and there may 
have been those who still more distinctly symbol- 
ized their spirit, with steel corslets, overlaid with 
lace and rich embroidery. 

So stood they in the presence, representing to the 
full the wealth, and genius, and stately civic pomp of 
England, until the king had pronounced his assent, 
in the express customary form, to the law which con- 
firmed the popular liberties ; and when, on hearing 
his unequivocal final assent, they burst into loud, 
even passionate acclamations of victorious joy, there 
had been from the first no scene more impressive In 
that venerable Hall, whose history went back to Ed- 
ward the Confessor. 

In what sharp contrast with the rich ceremonial and 
the splendid accessories of these preceding kindred 
events, appears that modest scene at Philadelphia, 
from which we gratefully date to-day a hundred years 
of constant and prosperous national life ! 

In a plain room, of an unpretending and recent 



Oration at Nezv York. 

buildine — the lower east room of what then was a 
State-house, what since has been known as the " In- 
dependence Hall " — in the midst of a city of perhaps 
thirty thousand inhabitants — a city which preserved 
its rural aspect, and the quaint simplicity of whose 
plan and structures had always been marked among 
American towns — were assembled probably less 
than fifty persons to consider a paper prepared by a 
young Virginia lawyer, giving reasons for a Resolve 
which the assembly had adopted two days before. 
They were farmers, planters, lawyers, physicians, sur- 
veyors of land, with one eminent Presbyterian clergy- 
man. A majority of them had been educated at such 
schools, or primitive colleges, as then existed on this 
continent, while a few had enjoyed the rare advantage 
of training abroad, and foreign travel ; but a consider- 
able number, and among them some of the most 
influential, had had no other education than that which 
they had gained by diligent reading while at their 
trades or on their farms. 

The figure to which our thoughts turn first is that 
of the author of the careful paper on the details of 
which the discussion turned. It has no special maj- 
esty or charm, the slight tall frame, the sun-burned 
face, the gray eyes spotted with hazel, the red hair 
which crowns the head ; but already, at the age ot 
thirty-three, the man has impressed himself on his 
associates as a master of principles, and of the Ian- 
guage in which those principles find expression, 



The Continental Consress 



^> 



SO that his colleagues have left to him, almost wholly, 
the work of preparing the important Declaration. 
He wants readiness in debate, and so is now silent ; 
but he listens eagerly to the vigorous argument and 
the forcible appeals of one of his fellows on the com- 
mittee, Mr. John Adams, and now and then speaks 
with another of the committee, much older than 
himself — a stout man, with a friendly face, in a plain 
dress, whom the world already had heard something 
of as Benjamin Franklin. These three are perhaps 
most prominently before us as we recall the vanished 
scene, though others were there of fine presence and 
cultivated manners, and though all impress us as 
substantial and respectable representative men, how- 
ever harsh the features of some, however brawny 
their hands with labor. But certainly nothing could 
be more unpretending, more destitute of pictorial 
charm than that small assembly of persons for the 
most part quite unknown to previous fame, and half 
of whose names it is not probable that half of us in 
this assembly could now repeat. 

After a discussion somewhat prolonged, as it 
seemed at the time, especially as it had been con- 
tinued from previous days, and after some minor 
amendments of the paper, toward evening it was 
adopted^ and ordered to be sent to the several 
States, signed by the president and the secretary ; 
and the simple transaction was complete. Whatever 
there may have been of proclamation and bell-ringing 



Oration at Nciv York. 

appears to have come on subsequent days. It was 
almost a full month before the paper was en- 
grossed, and signed by the members. It must have 
been nearly or quite the same time before the news 
of its adoption had reached the remoter parts of the 
land. 

If pomp of circumstances were necessary to make 
an event like this great and memorable, there would 
have been others in our own history more worthy far 
of our commemoration. As matched against multi- 
tudes in general history, it would sink into instant 
and complete insignificance. Yet here, to-day, a 
hundred years from the adoption of that paper, in 
a city which counts its languages by scores, and beats 
with the tread of a million feet, in a country whose 
enterprise flies abroad over sea and land on the rush 
of engines not then imagined, in a time so full of 
exciting hopes that it hardly has leisure to contem- 
plate the past, we pause from all our toil and traffic, 
our eager plans and impetuous debate, to commemo- 
rate the event. The whole land pauses, as I have 
said ; and some distinct impression of it will follow 
the sun, wherever he climbs the steep of Heaven, 
until in all countries it has more or less touched the 
thoughts of men. 

Why is this ? is a question, the answer to which 
should interpret and vindicate our assemblage. 

It is not simply because a century happens to have 
passed since the event thus remembered occurred. 



The Declaration an Act of the People. 

A hundred years are always closing from some event, 
and have been since Adam was in his prime. There 
was, of course, some special importance in the action 
then accomplished — in the nature of that action, 
since not in its circumstances — to justify such long 
record of it ; and that importance it is ours to define. 
In the perspective of distance the small things dis- 
appear, while the great and eminent keep their place. 
As Carlyle has said : " A king in the midst of his 
body-guards, with his trumpets, war-horses, and gilt 
standard-bearers, will look great though he be little ; 
only some Roman Carus can give audience to satrap 
ambassadors, while seated on the ground, with a 
woollen cap, and supping on boiled pease, like a 
common soldier."* 

What was, then, the great reality of power in what 
was done a hundred years since, which gives it its 
masterful place in history — makes it Roman and 
regal amid all its simplicity ? 

Of course, as the prime element of its power, it 
was the action of a People and not merely of per- 
sons ; and such action of a People has always a 
momentum, a public force, a historic significance, 
which can pertain to no individual arguments and 
appeals. There are times, indeed, when it has the 
energy and authority in it of a secular ihspiration ; 
when the supreme soul which rules the world comes 
through it to utterance, and a thought surpassing 

* Essay on Schiller. Essays: Vol. II., p. 301. 

23 



Oration at New York. 

man's wisest plan, a will transcending his strongest 
purpose, is heard in its commanding voice. 

It does not seem extravagant to say that the time 
to which our thoughts are turned was one of these. 

For a century and a half the emigrants from Eu- 
rope had brought hither, not the letters alone, the 
arts and industries, or the religious convictions, but 
the hardy moral and political life, which had there 
been developed in ages of strenuous struggle and 
work. France and Germany, Holland and Sweden, 
as well as England, Scotland, and Ireland, had con- 
tributed to this. The Austrian Tyrol, the Bavarian 
highlands, the Bohemian plain, Denmark, even Por- 
tugal, had had their part in this colonization. The 
ample domain which here received the earnest im- 
migrants had imparted to them of its own oneness ; 
and diversities of language, race, and custom, had 
fast disappeared in the governing unity of a com- 
mon aspiration, and a common purpose to work out 
through freedom a nobler well-being. 

The general moral life of this people, so various 
in origin, so accordant in spirit, had only risen to 
grander force through the toil and strife, the austere 
training, the long patience of endurance, to which it 
here had been subjected. The exposures to heat, 
and cold, and famine, to unaccustomed labors, to al- 
ternations of climate unknown in the old world, to 
malarial forces brooding above the mellow and drain- 
less recent lands, — these had fatally stricken many ; 
24 



Unity of the Colonies. 

but those who survived were tough and robust, the 
more so, perhaps, because of the perils which they 
had surmounted. Education was not easy, books 
were not many, and the daily newspaper was un- 
known ; but political discussion had been always 
going on, and men's minds had gathered unconscious 
force as they strove with each other, in eager de- 
bate, on questions concerning the common welfare. 
They had had much experience in subordinate legis- 
lation, on the local matters belonging to their care ; 
had acquired dexterity in performing public business, 
and had often had to resist or amend the suggestions 
or dictates of Royal governors. For a recent people, 
dwelling apart from older and conflicting states, they 
had had a large experience in war, the crack of the 
rifle being never unfamiliar along the near frontier, 
where disciplined skill was often combined with sav- 
age fury to sweep with sword or scar with fire their 
scattered settlements. 

By every species, therefore, of common work, of 
discussion, endurance, and martial struggle, the de- 
scendants of the colonists scattered along the Ameri- 
can coast had been allied to each other. They were 
more closely allied than they knew. It needed only 
some signal occasion, some summons to a sudden 
heroic decision, to bring them into instant general 
combination ; and Huguenot and Hollander, Swede, 
German, and Protestant Portuguese, as well as Eng- 
lishman, Scotchman, Irishman, would then forget 



Oration at New York, 

that their ancestors had been different, in the su- 
preme consciousness that now they had a common 
country, and before all else were all of them Ameri- 
cans. 

That time had come. That consciousness had for 
fifteen years been quickening in the people, since the 
"Writs of Assistance" had been applied for and 
granted, in 1761, when Otis, resigning his honorable 
position under the crown, had flung himself against 
the alarming innovation with an eloquence as blast- 
in q: as the stroke of the lio-htnino- which in the end 
destroyed his life. With every fresh invasion by 
England of their popular liberties, with every act 
which threatened such invasion by providing oppor- 
tunity and the instruments for it, the sense of a com- 
mon privilege and right, of a common inheritance in 
the country they were fashioning out of the forest, of 
a common place in the history of the world, had 
been increased among the colonists. They were 
plain people, with no strong tendencies to the ideal. 
They wanted only a chance for free growth ; but 
they must have that, and have it together, though 
the continent cracked. The diamond is formed, it 
has sometimes been supposed, under a swift enor- 
mous pressure, of masses meeting, and forcing the 
carbon into a crystal. The ultimate spirit of the 
American colonists was formed in like manner ; the 
weight of a rocky continent beneath, the weight of 

an o[)prcssion only intolerable because undehned 

26 



Agreement in the Declaration. 

pressing on it from above. But now that spirit, of 
inestimable price, reflecting light from every angle, 
and harder to be broken than anything material, was 
suddenly shown in acts and declarations of conven- 
tions and assemblies from the Penobscot to the St. 
Mary's. 

Any commanding public temper, once established 
in a people, grows bolder, of course, more inquisitive 
and inventive, more sensible of its rights, more de- 
termined on its future, as it comes more frequently 
into exercise. This in the colonies lately had had 
the most significant of all its expressions, up to that 
point, in the resolves of popular assemblies that the 
time had come for a final separation from the king- 
dom of Great Britain. The eminent Congress of 
two years before had given it powerful reinforcement. 
Now, at last, it entered the representative American 
assembly, and claimed from that the ultimate word. 
It found what it sought. The Declaration was only 
the voice of that supreme, impersonal force, that will 
of communities, that universal soul of the State. 

The vote of the colony then thinly covering a part 
of the spaces not yet wholly occupied by this great 
State, was not, indeed, at once formally given for 
such an instrument. It was wisely delayed, under 
the judicious counsel of Jay, till a provincial Congress 
could assemble, specially called, and formally author- 
ized, to pronounce the deliberate resolve of the 

colony ; and so it happened that only twelve colonies 

27 



Oration at New York. 

voted at first for the great Declaration, and that 
New York was not joined to the number till five 
days later. But Jay knew, and all knew, that numer- 
ous, wealthy, eminent in character, high in position 
as were those here and elsewhere in the country — in 
Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in the Carolinas — who 
were by no means yet prepared to sever their con- 
nection with Great Britain, the general and governing 
mind of the people was fixed upon this, with a de- 
cision which nothing could change, with a tenacity 
which nothino- could break. The forces tendino- to 

o o 

that result had wrought to their development with a 
steadiness and strength which the stubbornest resist- 
ance had hardly delayed. The spirit which now 
shook light and impulse over the land was recent in 
its precise demand, but as old in its birth as the first 
Christian settlements ; and it was that spirit — not of 
one, nor of fifty, not of all the individuals in all the 
conventions, but the vaster spirit which lay behind — 
which put itself on sudden record through the prompt 
and accurate pen of Jefierson. 

He was himself in full sympathy with it, and only 
by reason of that sympathy could give it such con- 
summate expression. Not out of books, legal re- 
searches, historical inquiry, the careful and various 
studies of language^ came that document ; but out 
of repeated public debate, out of manifold personal 
and private discussion, out of his clear sympathetic 
observation of the changing feeling and thought of 



Public Sentiment Declared. 

men, out of that exquisite personal sensibility to 
vague and impalpable popular impulses which was in 
him innately combined with artistic taste, an ideal 
nature, and rare power of philosophical thought. 
The voice of the cottage as well as the college, of 
the church as well as the leg^islative assemblv, was 
in the paper. It echoed the talk of the farmer in 
home-spun, as well as the classic eloquence of Lee, 
or the terrible tones of Patrick Henry. It gushed at 
last from the pen of its writer, like the fountain from 
the roots of Lebanon, a brimming river when it issues 
from the rock ; but it was because its sources had 
been supplied, its fullness filled, by unseen springs ; 
by the rivulets winding far up among the cedars, and 
percolating through hidden crevices in the stone ; by 
melting snows, whose white sparkle seemed still on 
the stream ; by fierce rains, with which the basins 
above were drenched ; by even the dews, silent 
and wide, which had lain in stillness all night upon 
the hill, 

The Platonic Idea of the development of the State 
was thus realized here ; first Ethics, then Politics. 
A public opinion, energetic and dominant, took its 
place from the start as the chief instrument of the 
new civilization. No dashing manoeuvre of skillful 
commanders, no sudden burst of popular passion, 
was in the Declaration ; but the vast mystery of a 
supreme and imperative public life, at once diffused 
and intense — behind all persons, before all plans, 

2q 



Oration at New York. 

beneath which individual wills are exalted, at whose 
touch the personal mind is inspired, and under whose 
transcendent impulse the smallest instrument becomes 
of a terrific force. That made the Declaration ; and 
that makes it now, in its modest brevity, take its 
place with Magna Charta and the Petition of Right, 
as full as they of vital force, and destined to a parallel 
permanence. 

Because this intense common life of a determined 
and manifold People was not behind them, other 
documents, in form similar to this, and in polish and 
cadence of balanced phrase perhaps its superiors, 
have had no hold like that which it keeps on the 
memory of men. What papers have challenged the 
attention of mankind within the century, in the 
stately Spanish tongue, in Mexico, New Granada, 
Venezuela, Bolivia, or the Argentine Republic, which 
the world at large has now quite forgotten ! How the 
resonant proclamations of German or of French 
Republicans, of Hungarian or Spanish revolutionists 
and patriots, have vanished as sound absorbed in 
the air ! Eloquent, persuasive, just, as they were, 
with a vigor of thought, a fervor of passion, a fine 
completeness and symmetry of expression, in which 
they could hardly be surpassed, they have now only 
a literary value. They never became great general 
forces. They were weak, because they were per- 
sonal ; and history is too crowded, civilization is too 

vast, to take much impression froni occasional docu- 
30 



The Declaration Old iii its Life. 

ments. Only then is a paper of secular force, or long- 
remembered, when behind it is the ubiquitous energy 
of the popular will, rolling through its words in vast 
diapason, and charging its clauses with tones of 
thunder. 

Because such an energy was behind it, our Decla- 
ration had its majestic place and meaning ; and they 
who adopted it saw nowhere else 

So rich advantage of a promised glory, 

As smiled upon the forehead of their action. 

Because of that, we read it still, and look to have it 
as audible as now, among the dissonant voices of the 
world, when other generations, in long succession, 
have come and gone ! 

But further, too, it must be observed that this 
paper, adopted a hundred years since, was not 
merely the declaration of a People, as distinguished 
from eminent and cultured individuals — a confession 
before the world of the public State-faith, rather 
than a political thesis — but it was also the declara- 
tion of a People which claimed for its own a great 
inheritance of equitable laws, and of practical liberty, 
and which now was intent to enlarge and enrich 
that. It had roots in the past, and a long gene- 
alogy ; and so it had a vitality inherent, and an im- 
mense energy. 

They who framed it went back, indeed, to first 

principles. There was something philosophic and 

31 



Oration at New York. 

ideal In their scheme, as always there is when the 
general mind is deeply stirred. It was not superfi- 
cial. Yet they were not undertaking to establish 
new theories, or to build their state upon artificial 
plans and abstract speculations. They were simply 
evolving out of the past what therein had been 
latent ; were liberating into fi'ee exhibition and un- 
ceasing activity a vital force older than the history of 
their colonization, and wide as the lands from which 
they came. They had the sweep of vast impulses 
behind them. The slow tendencies of centuries 
came to sudden consummation in their Declaration ; 
and the force of its impact upon the affairs and the 
mind of the world was not to be measured by its 
contents alone, but by the relation in which these 
stood to all the vehement discussion and, struggle of 
which it was the latest outcome. 

This ought to be, always, distinctly observed. 

The tendency is strong, and has been general, 
among those who have introduced great changes in 
the government of states, to follow some plan of po- 
litical, perhaps of social innovation, which enlists 
their judgment, excites their fancy, and to make a 
comely theoretic habitation for the national house- 
hold, rather than to build on the old foundations, — • 
expanding the walls, lifting the height, enlarging the 
doorways, enlightening with new windows the halls, 
but still keeping the strength and renewing the age 

of an old familiar and venerated structure. You re- 

32 



The Weakness of Theoretical Changes. 

member how in France, in 1789, and the following 
years, the schemes of those whom Napoleon called 
the " ideologists " succeeded each other, no one of 
them gaining a permanent supremacy, though each 
included important elements, till the armed consulate 
of 1799 swept them all into the air, and put in place 
of them one masterful genius and ambitious will. 
You remember how in Spain, in 181 2, the new Con- 
stitution proclaimed by the Cortes was thought to in- 
augurate with beneficent provisions a wholly new era 
of development and progress ; yet how the history 
of the splendid peninsula, from that day to this, has 
been but the record of a strueele to the death be- 
tween the Old and the New, the contest as desper- 
ate, it would seem, in our time as it was at the first. 

It must be so, always, when a preceding state of 
society and government, which has got itself estab- 
lished through many generations, is suddenly super- 
seded by a different fabric, however more evidently 
conformed to right reason. The principle is not so 
strong as the prejudice. Habit masters invention. 
The new and theoretic shivers its force on the obsti- 
nate coherence of the old and the established. The 
modern structure fails and is replaced, while the grim 
feudal keep, though scarred and weather-worn, the 
very cement seeming gone from its walls, still scowls 
defiance at the red right-hand of the lightning itself. 

It was no such rash speculative change which here 
was attempted. The People whose deputies framed 

33 



Oration at New York. 

our Declaration were largely themselves descendants 
of Englishmen ; and those who were not, had lived 
long enough under English institutions to be im- 
pressed with their tendency and spirit. It was there- 
fore only natural that even when adopting that 
ultimate measure which severed them from the 
British crown, they should retain all that had been 
gained in the mother-land through centuries of 
endurance and strife. They left nothing that was 
good ; they abolished the bad, added the needful, 
aind developed into a rule for the continent the splen- 
did precedents of great former occasions. They 
shared still the boast of Englishmen that their con- 
stitution " has no singfle date from which its duration 
is to be reckoned," and that " the origin of the 
English law is as undiscoverable as that of the Nile." 
They went back themselves, for the origin of their 
liberties, to the most ancient muniments of English 
freedom. Jefferson had affirmed, in 1774, that a 
primitive charter of American Independence lay in 
the fact that as the Saxons had left their native wilds 
in the North of Europe, and had occupied Britain — 
the country which they left asserting over them 
no further control, nor any dependence of them upon 
it — so the Englishmen coming hither had formed, by 
that act, another state, over which Parliament had no 
rights, in which its laws were void till accepted.* 

But while seeking for their liberties so archaic a 
basis, neither he nor his colleagues were in the least 

34 * Works, Vol I. p. 125. 



Loyalty of the Colonies to English Precedeitts. 

careless of what subsequent times had done to com- 
plete them. There was not one element of popular 
right, which had been wrested from crown and noble 
in any age, which they did not keep ; not an equitable 
rule, for the transfer or the division of property, for 
the protection of personal rights, or for the detection 
and punishment of crime, which was not precious in 
their eyes. Even Chancery jurisdiction they widely 
retained, with the distinct tribunals, derived from the 
ecclesiastical courts, for probate of wills ; and English 
technicalities were maintained in their courts, almost 
as if they were sacred things. Especially that 
equality of civil rights among all commoners, which 
Hallam declares the most prominent characteristic of 
the English Constitution — the source of its per- 
manence, its improvement, and its vigor — they per- 
fectly preserved ; they only more sharply affirmatively 
declared it. Indeed, in renouncing their allegiance 
to the king, and putting the United Colonies in his 
place, they felt themselves acting in intimate harmony 
with the spirit and drift of the ancient constitution. 
The Executive here was to be elective, not heredi- 
tary, to be limited and not permanent in the term of 
his functions ; and no established peerage should 
exist. But each State retained its governor, its 
legislature, generally in two houses, its ancient 
statute and common law ; and if they had been chal- 
lenged for English authority for their attitude toward 
the crowm, they might have replied in the words of 



Oration at New York. 

Bracton, the Lord Chief-Justice five hundred years 
before, under the reign of Henry the Third, that " the 
law makes the king; " ''there is no king, where will, 
and not law, bears rule ; " "if the king were without 
a bridle, that is the law, they ought to put a bridle 
upon him." * They might have replied in the words 
of Fox, speaking in Parliament, in daring defiance of 
the temper of the House, but with many supporting 
him, when he said that in declaring Independence, 
they " had done no more than the English had done 
against James the Second." f 

* Ipse autem rex, non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et sub 
Lege, quia Lex facit regem. Attribuat igitur rex Legi quod Lex attribuit 
ei, videlicet dominationem et potestatein, non est eniin rex ubi domi- 
natur voluntas et non Lex. De Leg. et Cons. Angliae ; Lib. L, cap 
8, P. 5' 

Rex autem habet superiorem, Deum. Item, Legem, per quam factus 
est rex. Item, curiam suam, videlicet comites, Barones, quia comites 
dicuntur quasi socii regis, et qui habet socium habet magistrum ; et ideo 
si rex fuerit sine fraeno, i. e. sine Lege, debent ei fraenum ponere ; etc. 
Lib. II., cap. 1 6, P. 3. 

The following is still more explicit : '' As the head of a body 
natural cannot change its nerves and sinews, cannot deny to the several 
parts their proper energy, their due proportion and aliment of blood ; 
neither can a King, who is the head of a body politic, change the laws 
thereof, nor take from the people what is theirs by right, against their 
consent. * * For he is appointed to protect his subjects in their 
lives, properties, and laws ; for this very end and purpose he has the 
delegation of power from the people, and he has no just claim to any 
other power but this." Sir John Fortescue's Treatise, De Laudibus 
Legum Angliae, c. 9, [about A. D. 1470,] quoted by Hallam, Mid. Ages, 
chap. VIII., part III. 

t Speech of October 31, 1776: "The House divided on the Amend- 
ment. Yeas, 87 ; nays* 242." 
36 



Rulers, Properly Representatives of the People. 

They had done no more ; though they had not 
elected another king in place of him whom they re- 
nounced. They had taken no step so far in advance 
of the then existing English Constitution as those 
which the Parliament of 1640 took in advance of 
the previous Parliaments which Charles had dis- 
solved. If there was a right more rooted than an- 
other in that Constitution, it was the right of the 
people which was taxed to have its vote in the tax- 
ing legislature. If there was anything more accord- 
ant than another with its historic temper and tenor, 
it was that the authority of the king was determined 
when his rule became tyrannous. Jefferson had but 
perfectly expressed the doctrine of the lovers of free- 
dom in England for many generations, when he said 
in his Summary view of the Rights of America, in 
1774, that "the monarch is no more than the chief 
officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and cir- 
cumscribed with definite powers, to assist, in work- 
ing the great machine of government, erected for 
their use, and consequently subject to their superin- 
tendence ; " that " kings are the servants, not the 
proprietors of the people ; " and that a nation claims 
its rio-hts, "as derived from the laws of nature, not 
as the eift of their chief magistrate."* 

* Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees, for the peo- 
ple, and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or 
wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority 
that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better 
agents, attorneys, and trustees.— JOHN Adams, Dissertation on Canon 
and Feudal Law ; 1765. Works : Vol. III., pp. 45^7- ol 



Oration at New York. 

That had been the spirit, if not as yet the formu- 
lated doctrine, of Raleigh, Hampden, Russell, Syd- 
ney — of all the great leaders of liberty in England, 
Milton had declared it, in a prose as majestic as any 
passage of the Paradise Lost. The Commonwealth 
had been built on it ; and the whole Revolution of 
1688. And they who now framed it into their per- 
manent organic law, and made it supreme in the 
country they were shaping, were in harmony with the 
noblest inspirations of the past. They were not in- 
novating with a rash recklessness. They were sim- 
ply accepting and re-affirming what they had learned 
from luminous events and illustrious men. So their 
work had a dignity, a strength, and a permanence 
which can never belong to mere fresh speculation. 
It interlocked with that of multitudes eoinsf before. 
It derived a virtue from every field of struggle in 
England ; from every scaffold, hallowed by free and 
consecrated blood ; from every hour of great debate. 
It was only the complete development into law, for a 
separated people, of that august ancestral liberty, the 
germs of which had preceded the Heptarchy, the grad- 
ual definition and establishment of which had been 
the glory of English history. A thousand years 
brooded over the room where they asserted heredi- 
tary rights. Its walls showed neither portraits nor 
mottoes ; but the Kaiser-saal at Frankfurt was not 
hung around with such recollections. No titles were 

worn by those plain men ; but there had not been 

33 



English Liberty, the Parent of Ours. 

one knightly soldier, or one patriotic and prescient 
statesman, standing for liberty in the splendid centu- 
turles of its English growth, who did not touch them 
with unseen accolade, and bid them be faithful. The 
paper which they adopted, fresh from the pen of its 
young author, and written on his hired pine table, 
was already, in essential life, of a venerable age ; and 
it took immense impulse, it derived an instant and 
vast authority, from its relation to that undying past 
in which they too had grand inheritance, and from 
which their public life had come. J 

Englishmen themselves now recognize this, and 
often are proud of it. The distinguished represent- 
ative of Great Britain at Washington may think his 
government, as no doubt he does, superior to ours ; 
but his clear eye cannot fail to see that English lib- 
erty was the parent of ours, and that the new and 
broader continent here opened before it, suggested 
that expansion of it which we celebrate to-day. His 
ancestors, like ours, helped to build the Republic ; 
and its faithfulness to the past, amid all reformations, 
was one great secret of its earliest triumph, has 
been one source, from that day to this, of its endur- 
ing and prosperous strength. 

The Congress, and the People behind it, asserted 
for themselves hereditary liberties, and hazarded 
everything in the purpose to complete them. But 
they also affirmed, with emphasis and effect, another 
right, more general than this, which made their action 

39 



Oratio7i at New York. 

significant and important to other peoples, which 
made it, indeed, a signal to the nations of the right 
of each to assert for itself the just prerogative of 
forming its government, electing Its rulers, ordain- 
ing its laws, as might to It seem most expedient. 
Hear asfaln the Immortal words : " We hold these 
truths to be self-evident ; * * that to secure these 
[unalienable] rights, governments are Instituted 
among men, deriving their just powers from the con- 
sent of the governed ; that whenever any form of 
government becomes destructive of these ends, It Is 
the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to 
Institute new government, laying Its foundations In 
such principles, and organizing Its powers In such 
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their 
safety and happiness." 

This is what the party of Bentham called "the as- 
sumption of natural rights, claimed without the 
slightest evidence of their existence, and supported 
by vague and declamatory generalities." This Is 
what we receive as the . decisive and noble declara- 
tion, spoken with the simplicity of a perfect convic- 
tion, of a natural right as patent as the continent ; a 
declaration which challenged at once the attention of 
mankind, and which Is now practically assumed as a 
premise in international relations and public law. 

Of course it was not a new discovery. It was old 
as the earliest of political philosophers ; as old, in- 
deed, as the earliest communities, which, becoming 
40 



The Dutch Reptiblic, Exceptional in Europe. 

established in particular locations, had there devel- 
oped their own institutions, and repelled with ve- 
hemence the assaults that would change them. But 
in the growth of political societies, and the vast 
expansion of imperial states, by the conquest of 
those adjacent and weaker, this right, so easily rec- 
ognized at the outset, so germane to the instincts, 
so level with the reason, of every community, had 
widely passed out of men's thoughts ; and the 
power of a conquering state to change the institu- 
tions and laws of a people, or impose on it new 
ones, — the power of a parent state to shape the 
forms and prescribe the rules of the colonies which 
went from it, — had been so long and abundantly 
exercised, that the very right of the people, thus con- 
quered or colonial, to consult its own interests in the 
frame of its government, had been almost forgotten. 
It might be a high speculation of scholars, or a 
charming dream of political enthusiasts. But it was 
not a maxim for the practical statesman ; and what- 
ever its correctness as an ideal principle, it was vain 
to expect to see it established in a world full of 
kings who claimed, each for himself, an authority from 
God, and full of states intent on grasping and gov- 
erning by their law adjacent domains. The revolt 
of the Netherlands against Spanish domination had 
been the one instance in modern history in which 
the inherent right of a People to suit itself in the 

frame of its government had been proclaimed, and 

41 



Oration at New Yo7'k. 

then maintained ; and that had been at the outset a 
paroxysmal revolt, against tyranny so crushing, and 
cruelties so savage, that they took it out of the line 
of examples. The Dutch Republic was almost as 
exceptional, through the fierce wickedness which had 
crowded it into being, as was Switzerland itself, on 
its Alpine heights. For an ordinary state to claim 
self-regulation, and found its government on a Ple- 
biscit, was to contradict precedent, and to set at 
defiance European tradition. 

Our fathers, however, in a somewhat vague way, 
had held from the start that they had right to an 
autonomy; and that acts of Parliament, if not appoint- 
ments of the crown, took proper effect upon these 
shores only by reason of their assent. Their char- 
ters were held to confirm this doctrine. The con- 
viction, at first practical and instinctive, rather than 
theoretic, had grown with their growth, and had 
been intensified into positive affirmation and public 
exhibition as the British rule impinged more sharply 
on their interests and their hopes. It had finally be- 
come the general and decisive conviction of the col- 
onies. It had spoken already in armed resistance 
to the troops of the king. It had been articulated, 
with gathering emphasis, in many resolves of assem- 
blies and conventions. It was now, finally, most 
energetically, set forth to the world in the great 
Declaration ; and in that utterance, made general, 
not particular, and founding the rights of the people 



The Declaration Instructive to other Nations. 

in this country on principles as wide as humanity 
itself, there lay an appeal to every nation : — an ap- 
peal whose words took unparalleled force, were 
illuminated and made rubrical, in the fire and blood 
of the following war. 

When the Emperor Ferdinand visited Innsbruck, 
that beautiful town of the Austrian Tyrol, in 1838, 
it is said that the inhabitants wrote his name 
in immense bonfires, along the sides of the precipit- 
ous hills which shelter the town. Over a space of four 
or five miles extended that colossal illumination, till 
the heavens seemed on fire in the far-reflected up- 
streaming- glow. The right of a people, separated 
from others, to its own institutions — our fathers wrote 
this in lines so vivid and so large that the whole 
world could see them ; and they followed that writ- 
ing with the consenting thunders of so many can- 
non that even the lands across the Atlantic were 
shaken and filled with the long reverberation. 

The doctrine had, of course, in every nation, its 
two-fold internal application, as well as its front 
against external powers. On the one hand it swept 
with destroying force against the notion, so long 
maintained, of the right of certain families in the 
world, called Hapsburg, Bourbon, Stuart, or what- 
ever, to eovern the rest ; and wherever it was re- 
ceived it made the imagined divine right of kings an 
obsolete and contemptible fiction. On the other 

hand, it smote with equal energy against the preten- 

43 



Oration at New York. 

sions of any minority within the state — whether 
banded together by the ties of descent, or of neigh- 
borliood in location, or of common opinion, or sup- 
posed common interest — to govern the rest ; or 
even to impair the estabhshed and paramount gov- 
ernment of the rest by separating themselves or- 
ganically from it. 

It was never the doctrine of the fathers that the 
people of Kent, Cornwall, or Lincoln, might sever 
themselves from the rest of England, and, while they 
had their voice and vote in the public councils, might 
assert the right to govern the whole, under threat of 
withdrawal if their minor vote were not suffered to 
control. They were not seeking to initiate anarchy, 
and to make it thenceforth respectable in the world 
by support of their suffrages. They recognized the 
fact that the state exists to meet permanent needs, 
is the ordinance of God as well as the family ; and 
that He has determined the bounds of men's habita- 
tion, by rivers, seas, and mountain chains, shaping 
countries as well as continents into physical coher- 
ence, while giving one man his birth on the north of 
the Pyrenees, another on the south, one on the 
terraced banks of the Rhine, another in English 
meadow or upland. They saw that a common and 
fixed habitation, in a country thus physically defined, 
especially when combined with community of de- 
scent, of permanent public interest, and of the lan- 
ofuaore on which thought is interchanijed — that these 

44 



The People, as a Whole, Sovereign. 

make a People ; and such a People, as a true and 
abiding body-politic, they affirmed had right to shape 
its government, forbidding others to intermeddle. 

But it must be the general mind of the People 
which determined the questions thus involved ; not a 
dictating class within the state, whether known as 
peers or associated commoners, whether scattered 
widely, as one among several political parties, or 
grouped together in some one section, and having a 
special interest to encourage. The decision of the 
general public mind, as deliberately reached, and 
authentically declared, that must be the end of de- 
bate ; and the right of resistance, or the right of divi- 
sion, after that, if such right exist, it is not to be vin- 
dicated from their Declaration. Any one who thought 
such government by the whole intolerable to him was 
always at liberty to expatriate himself, and find else- 
where such other institutions as he might prefer. But 
he could not tarry, and still not submit. He was not a 
monarch, without the crown, before whose contrary 
judgment and will the public councils must be dumb. 
While dwelling in the land, and having the same op- 
portunity with others to seek the amendment of what 
he disapproved, the will of the whole was binding 
upon him ; and that obligation he could not vacate by 
refusing to accept it. If one could not, neither could 
ten, nor a hundred, nor a million, who still remained 
a minority of the whole. 

To allow such a right would have been to make 

45 



Oration at New York. 

v/ government transparently impossible. Not separate 
sections only, but counties, townships, school dis- 
tricts, neighborhoods, must have the same right ; and 
each individual, with his own will for his final law, 
must be the complete ultimate State. 

It was no such disastrous folly which the fathers 
of our Republic affirmed. They ruled out kings, 
princes, peers, from any control over the People ; 
and they did not give to a transient minority, 
wherever it might appear, on whatever question, a 
greater privilege, because less defined, than that 
which they jealously withheld from these classes. 
Such a tyranny of irresponsible occasional minorities 
would have seemed to them only more intolerable 
than that of classes, organized, permanent, and limit- 
ed by law. And when it was affirmed by some, and 
silently feared by many others, that in our late im- 
mense civil war the multitudes who adhered to the 
old Constitution had forgotten or discarded the prin- 
ciples of the earlier Declaration, those assertions and 
fears were alike without reason. The People which 
adopted that Declaration, when distributed into 
colonies, was the People which afterward, when com- 
pacted into states, established the Confederation of 
1781 — imperfect enough, but whose abiding renown 
it is that under it the war was ended. It was the same 
People which subsequently framed the supreme 
Constitution. " We, the people of the United States," 

do ordain and establish the following Constitution, 
46 



The ConstihUion StLprcme. 

— so runs the majestic and vital instrument. It 
contains provisions for its own emendation. When 
the people will, they may set it aside, and put in 
place of it one wholly different ; and no other nation 
can intervene. But while it continues, it, and the 
laws made normally under it, are not subject to re- 
sistance by a portion of the people, conspiring to 
direct or limit the rest. And whensoever any pre- 
tension like this shall appear, if ever again it does 
appear, it will undoubtedly as instantly appear that, 
even as in the past so in the future, the people 
whose our government is, and whose complete and 
magnificent domain God has marked out for it, will 
subdue resistance, compel submission, forbid seces- 
sion, though it cost again, as it cost before, four 
years of war, with treasure uncounted and inestima- 
ble life. 

The right of a People upon its own territory, as 
equally against any classes within it or any external 
powers, this is the doctrine of our Declaration. We 
know how it here has been applied, and how settled 
it is upon these shores for the time to come. We 
know, too, something of what impression it instantly 
made upon the minds of other peoples, and how they 
sprang to greet and accept it. In the fine image of 
Bancroft, "the astonished nations, as they read that 
all men are created equal, started out of their leth- 
argy, like those who have been exiles from child- 



47 



Oration at New York. 

hood, when they suddenly hear the dimly-remembered 
accents of their mother-tonofue."* 

The theory of scholars had now become the maxim 
of a State. The diffused ineffectual nebulous liorht had 
got Itself concentered into an orb ; and the radiance 
of it, penetrating- and hot, shone afar. You know 
how France responded to it ; with passionate speed 
seeking to be rid of the terrific establishments in 
church and state which had nearly crushed the life 
of the people, and with a beautiful though credulous 
unreason trying to lift, by the grasp of the law, into 
intelligence and political capacity the masses whose 
training for thirteen centuries had been despotic. No 
operation of natural law was any more certain than 
the failure of that too daring experiment. But the 
very failure involved progress from it ; involved, 
undoubtedly, that ultimate success which it was vain 
to try to extemporize. Certainly the other European 
powers will not again intervene, as they did, to re- 
store a despotism which France has abjured, and 
with foreign bayonets to uphold institutions which it 
does not desire. Italy, Spain, Germany, England — 
they are not Republican in the form of their govern- 
ment, nor as yet democratic in the distribution ot 
power. But each of them is as full of this organific, 
self-demonstrating doctrine, as is our own land ; and 
England would send no troops to Canada to compel 
its submission if it should decide to set up for itself. 

*Vol. VIII., p. 473. 

48 



Liberal States most Secure. 

Neither Italy nor Spain would maintain a monarchy 
a moment longer than the general mind of the 
country preferred it. Germany would be fused in 
the fire of one passion if any foreign nation whatever 
should assume to dictate the smallest change in one 
of its laws. 

The doctrine of the proper prerogative of kings, 
derived from God, which in the last century was 
more common in Europe than the doctrine of the 
centrality of the sun in our planetary system, is now 
as obsolete among the intelligent as are the epicycles 
of Ptolemy. Every government expects to stand 
henceforth by assent of the governed, and by no 
other claim of right It is strong by beneficence, not 
by tradition ; and at the height of its military suc- 
cesses it circulates appeals, and canvasses for ballots. 
Revolution is carefully sought to be averted, by 
timely and tender amelioration of the laws. The 
most progressive and liberal states are most evi- 
dently secure ; while those which stand, like old 
olive-trees at Tivoli, with feeble arms supported on 
pillars, and hollow trunks filled up with stone, are 
palpably only tempting the blast. An alliance of 
sovereigns, like that called the Holy, for recon- 
structing the map of Europe, and parcelling out the 
passive peoples among separate governments, would 
to-day be no more possible than would Charlemagne's 
plan for reconstructing the empire of the West. 
Even Murad, Sultan of Turkey, now takes the place 

49 



Oration at New York. 

of Abdul the deposed, " by the grace of God, and the 
will of the people ; " and that accomplished and illus- 
trious Prince, whose empire under the Southern 
Cross rivals our own in its extent, and most nearly 
approaches it on this hemisphere in stability of insti- 
tutions and in practical freedom, has his surest title 
to the throne which he honors, in his wise liberality, 
and his faithful endeavor for the good of his people. 
As long as in this he continues, as now, a recognized 
leader among the monarchs — ready to take and seek 
suggestions from even a democratic Republic — his 
throne will be steadfast as the water-sheds of Brazil ; 
and while his successors maintain his sjDirit, no 
domestic insurrection will test the question whether 
they retain that celerity in movement with which 
Dom Pedro has astonished Americans. 

It is no more possible to reverse this tendency 
toward popular sovereignty, and to substitute for it 
the right of families, classes, minorities, or of inter- 
vening foreign states, than it is to arrest the motion 
of the earth, and make it swing the other way in its 
annual orbit. In this, at least, our fathers' Decla- 
ration has made its impression on the history of 
mankind. 

It was the act of a People, and not of persons, 
except as these represented and led that. It was the 
act of a People, not starting out on new theories of 
government, so much as developing into forms of 
law and practical force a great and gradual inherit- 



so 



Effect on Popular Advancement. 

ance of freedom. It was the act of a People, de- 
claring for others, as for itself, the right of each to 
its own form of government, without interference 
from other nations, without restraint by privileged 
classes. 

It only remains, then, to ask the question how far 
it has contributed to the peace, the advancement, 
and the permanent welfare, of the People by which 
it was set forth ; of other nations which it has af- 
fected. And to ask this question is almost to 
answer it. The answer is as evident as the sun in 
the heavens. 

It certainly cannot be affirmed that we in America, 
any more than persons or peoples elsewhere, have 
reached as yet the ideal state, of private liberty 
combined with a perfect public order, or of culture 
complete, and a supreme character^ The political 
world, as well as the religious, since Christ was on 
earth, looks forward, not backward, for its millen^ 
nium. That Golden Age is still to come which is to 
shine in the perfect splendor reflected from Him who 
is ascended ; and no prophecy tells us how long be- 
fore the advancinof race shall reach and cross its 
glowing marge, or what long effort, or what tumults 
of battle, are still to precede. 

In this country, too, there have been immense spe- 
cial impediments to hinder wide popular progress in 
things which are highest. Our people have had a 
continent to subdue. They have been, from the 



Oration at New York. 

start, In constant migration. Westward, from the 
counties of the Hudson and the Mohawk, around 
the lakes, over the prairies, across the great river, — • 
westward still, over alkali plains, across terrible 
canons, up gorges of the mountains where hardly 
the wild goat could find footing, — westward always, 
till the Golden Gate opened out on the sea which 
has been made ten thousand miles wide, as if nothing 
less could stop the march, — this has been the popu- 
lar movement, from almost the day of the great Dec- 
laration. To-morrow's tents have been pitched in new 
fields ; and last year's houses await new possessors. 
With such constant change, such wide dislocation 
of the mass of the people from early and settled 
home-associations, and with the incessant occupation 
of the thoughts by the great physical problems pre- 
sented, — not so much by any struggle for existence, 
as by harvests for which the prairies waited, by mills 
for which the rivers clamored, by the coal and the 
gold which offered themselves to the grasp of the 
miner, — it would not have been strange if a great 
and dangerous decadence had occurred in that do- 
mestic and private virtue of which Home is the 
nursery, in that generous and reverent public spirit 
which is but the effluence of its combined rays. It 
would have been wholly too much to expect that 
under such influences the highest progress should 
have been realized, in speculative thought, in ar- 
tistic culture, or in the researches of pufe science. 



Literary Attainments. 

Accordingly, we find that in these departments 
not enouo-h has been accompUshed to make our 
progress signal in them, though here and there the 
eminent souls " that are like stars and dwell apart " 
have illumined themes highest with their high inter- 
pretation. But History has been cultivated among 
us, with an enthusiasm, to an extent, hardly, I think, 
to have been anticipated among a people so recent 
and expectant ; and Prescott, Motley, Irving, Tick- 
nor, with him upon whose splendid page all Ameri- 
can history has been amply illustrated, are known as 
familiarly and honored as highly in Europe as here. 
We have had as well distinguished poets, and have 
them now; to whom the nation has been respon- 
sive ; who have not only sung themselves, but 
throuo-h whom the noblest poems of the Old World 
have come into the English tongue, rendered m fit 
and perfect music, and some of whose minds, blos- 
somino- lons" ao-o in the solemn or beautiful fancies 
of youth, with perennial energy still ripen to new 
fruit as they near or cross their four-score years. 
In Medicine, and Law, as well as in Theology, in 
Fiction, Biography, and the vivid Narrative of explo- 
ration and discovery, the people whose birdi-day we 
commemorate has added something to the posses- 
sion of men. Its sculptors and painters have won 
high places in the brilliant realm of modern art. 
Publicists like Wheaton, jurists Hke Kent, have 
gained a celebrity reflecting honor on the land ; and 

S3 



Oration at New York. 

if no orator, so vast in knowledge, so profound and 
discursive in philosophical thought, so affluent in 
imagery, and so glorious in diction, as Edmund 
Burke, has yet appeared, we must remember that 
centuries were needed to produce him elsewhere, 
and that any of the great Parliamentary debaters, 
aside from him, have been matched or surpassed in 
the hearing of those who have hung with rapt sym- 
pathetic attention on the lips of Clay, or of Rufus 
Choate, or have felt themselves listening to the 
mightiest mind which ever touched theirs when they 
stood beneath the imperial voice in which Webster 
spoke. 

In applied science there has been much done in 
the country, for which the world admits itself our 
grateful debtor. I need not multiply illustrations of 
this, from locomotives, printing-presses, sewing- 
machines, revolvers, steam-reapers, bank-locks. One 
instance suffices, most signal of all. 

When Morse, from Washington, thirty-two years 
ago, sent over the wires his word to Baltimore, 
<' What hath God wrought," he had given to all 
the nations of mankind an instrument the most sen- 
sitive, expansive, quickening, which the world yet 
possesses. He had bound the earth in electric net- 
work. 

England touches India to-day, and France Algeria, 
while we are in contact with all the continents, upon 
those scarcely perceptible nerves. The great strat- 

54 



The Electric Telegraph. 

egist, like Von Moltke, with these in his hands, 
from the silence of his office directs campaigns, dic- 
tates marches, wins victories ; the statesman in the 
cabinet inspires and regulates the distant diplomacies ; 
while the traveler in any port or mart is by the 
same marvel of mechanism in instant communication 
with all centres of commerce. It is certainly not 
too much to say that no other invention of the world 
in this century has so richly deserved the medals, 
crosses, and diamond decorations, the applause of 
senates, the gifts of kings, which were showered upon 
its author, as did this invention, which finally taught 
and utilized the lightnings whose nature a signer 
of the great Declaration had made apparent. 

But after all it is not so much in special inventions, 
or in eminent attainments made by individuals, that 
we are to find the answer to the question, " What 
did that day, a hundred years since, accomplish for 
us?" Still less is it found in the progress we 
have made in outward wealth and material success. 
This might have been made, approximately at least, 
if the British supremacy had here continued. The 
prairies would have been as productive as now, the 
mines of copper and silver and gold as rich and ex- 
tensive, the coal-beds as vast, and the cotton-fields 
as fertile, if we had been born the subjects of the 
Georges, or of Victoria. Steam would have kept its 
propulsive force, and sea and land have been theatres 
of its triumph. The river would have been as 

55 



Oration at New York. 

smooth a highway for the commerce which seeks it ; 
and the leap of every mountain stream would have 
given as swift and constant a push to the wheels that 
set spindles and saws in motion. Electricity itself 
would have lo^t no property, and might have become 
as completely as now the fire-winged messenger of 
the thought of mankind. 

But what we have now, and should not have had 
except for that paper which the Congress adopted, 
is the general and increasing popular advancement 
in knowledge, vigor, as I believe in moral culture, of 
which our country has been the arena, and in which 
lies its hope for the future. The independence of 
the nation has reacted, with sympathetic force, on 
the personal life which the nation includes. It has 
made men more resolute, aspiring, confident, and 
more susceptible to whatever exalts. The doctrine 
that all by creation are equal, — not in respect of 
physical force or of mental endowment, of means for 
culture or inherited privilege, but in respect of im- 
mortal faculty, of duty to each other, of right to 
protection and to personal development,- — this has 
given manliness to the poor, enterprise to the weak, 
a kindling hope to the most obscure. It has made 
the individuals of whom the nation is composed 
more alive to the forces which educate and exalt. 

There has been incessant motive, too, for the wide 
and constant employment of these forces. It has 

been felt that, as the People is sovereign here, that 

56 



The Efficiency of the Chitrch. 

People must be trained in mind and spirit for its 
august and sovereign function. The establishment 
of common-schools, for a needful primary secular 
training, has been an instinct of Society, only recog- 
nized and repeated in provisions of statutes. The 
establishment of higher schools, classical and gen- 
eral, of colleges, scientific and professional semi- 
naries, has been as well the impulse of the nation, 
and the furtherance of them a care of governments. 
The immense expansion of the press in this country 
has been based fundamentally upon the same im- 
pulse, and has wrought with beneficent general 
force in the same direction. Religious instruction 
has gone as widely as this distribution of secular 
knowledge. 

It used to be thought that a Church dissevered 
from the State must be feeble. Wanting wealth of 
endowments and dignity of titles— its clergy entitled 
to no place among the peers, its revenues assured by 
no legal enactments — it must remain obscure and 
poor ; while the absence of any external limitations, 
of parliamentary statutes and a legal creed, must 
leave it liable to endless division, and tend to its 
speedy disintegration Into sects and schisms. It 
seemed as hopeless to look for strength, wealth, be- 
neficence, for extensive educational and missionary 
work, to such churches as these, as to look for ag- 
gressive military organization to a convention of 



57 



Oration at New York. '^% 

farmers, or for the volume and thunder of Niaeara 
to a thousand sinking and separate rills. 

But the work which was given to be done in this 
country was so great and momentous, and has been 
so constant, that matching itself against that work, 
the Church, under whatever name, has realized a 
strength, and developed an activity, wholly fresh in 
the world in modern times. It has not been antago- 
nized by that instinct of liberty which always awakens 
against its work where religion is required by law. 
It has seized the opportunity. Its ministers and 
members have had their own standards, leaders, 
laws, and sometimes have quarreled, fiercely enough, 
as to which were the better. But in the work which 
was set them to do, to give to the sovereign Amer- 
ican people the knowledge of God in the Gospel of 
His Son, their only strife has been one of emulation — 
to go the furthest, to give the most, and to bless most 
largely the land and its future. 

The spiritual incentive has of course been su- 
preme ; but patriotism has added its impulse to the 
work. It has been felt that Christianity is the basis 
of Republican empire, its bond of cohesion, its life- 
giving law ; that the manuscript copies of the Gospels, 
sent by Gregory to Augustine at Canterbury, and still 
preserved on sixth century parchments at Oxford and 
Cambridge — more than Magna Charta itself, these are 
the roots of English liberty ; that Magna Charta, and 

the Petition of Right, with our completing Declaration, 

58 



Effect of Educational Work. 

were possible only because these had been before them. 
And so in the work of keeping Christianity prevalent 
in the land, all earnest churches have eagerly striven. 
Their preachers have been heard where the pioneer's 
fire scarcely was kindled. Their schools have been 
gathered in the temporary camp, not less than in the 
hamlet or town. They have sent their books with 
lavish distribution, they have scattered their Bibles 
like leaves of autumn, where settlements hardly were 
more than prophesied. In all languages of the land 
they have told the old story of the Law and the 
Cross, a present Redemption, and a coming Tribunal 
The highest truths, most solemn and inspiring, have 
been the truths most constantly in hand. It has 
been felt that, in the highest sense, a muscular Chris^ 
tianity was indispensable where men lifted up axes 
upon the thick trees. The delicate speculations of the 
closet and the schools were too dainty for the work ; 
and the old confessions of Councils and Reformers, 
whose undecaying and sovereign energy no use ex- 
hausts, have been those always most familiar, where 
the trapper on his stream, or the miner in his gulch, 
has found priest or minister on his track. 

Of course not all the work has been fruitful. Not 
all God's acorns come to oaks, but here and there 
one. Not all the seeds of flowers germinate, but 
enough to make some radiant gardens. And out of 
all this work and gift, has come a mental and moral 
training, to the nation at large, such as it certainly 



Oratio7i at New York. 

would not have had except for this effort, the effort 
for which would not have been made, on a scale so 
immense, except for this incessant aim to fit the 
nation for its great experiment of self-regulation. 
The Declaration of Independence has been the great 
charter of Public Education ; has given impulse and 
scope to this prodigious Missionary work. 

The result of the whole is evident enough. I am 
not here as the eulogist of our People, beyond what 
facts justify. I admit, with regret, that American 
manners sometimes are coarse, and American culture 
often very imperfect ; that the noblest examples of 
consummate training imply a leisure which we have 
not had, and are perhaps most easily produced where 
social advantages are more permanent than here, and 
the law of heredity has a wider recognition. We all 
know, too well, how much of even vice and shame 
there has been, and is, in our national life ; how slug- 
gish the public conscience has been before sharpest 
appeals ; how corruption has entered high places in 
the government, and the blister of its touch has been 
upon laws, as well as on the acts of prominent offi- 
cials. And we know the reckless greed and ambi- 
tion, the fierce party spirit, the personal wrangles and 
jealous animosities, with which our Congress has 
been often dishonored, at which the nation — sadder 
still — has sometimes laughed, in idiotic unreason. 

But knowing all this, and with the impression of 
it full on our thoughts^ we may exult in the real, 

Go 



The Natioii s Moral Soundness. 

steady, and prophesying growth of a better spirit 
toward dominance in the land. I scout the thoueht 
tliat we as a people are worse than our fathers ! 
John Adams, at the head of the War Department, 
in 1776, wrote bitter laments of the corruption which 
existed in even that infant age of the Republic, and 
of the spirit of venality, rapacious and insatiable, 
which was then the most alarming enemy of America. 
He declared himself ashamed of the age which he 
lived in ! In Jefferson's day, all Federalists expected 
the universal dominion of French infidelity. In 
Jackson's day, all Whigs thought the country gone 
to ruin already, as if Mr. Biddle had had the entire 
public hope locked up in the vaults of his terminated 
bank. In Polk's day, the excitements of the Mexi- 
can War gave life and germination to many seeds of 
rascality. There has never been a time — not here 
alone, in any country — when the fierce light of in- 
cessant inquiry blazing on men in public life, would 
not have revealed forces of evil like what we have 
seen, or when the condemnation which followed the 
discovery would have been sharper. And it is 
among my deepest convictions th .t, with all which 
has happened to debase and debauch it, the nation 
at large was never before more mentally vigorous or 
morally sound. 

Gentlemen : The demonstration is around us ! 

This city, if any place on the continent, should have 
been the one where a reckless wickedness should 

6i 



r\. 



Oration at New York. 

have had sure prevalence, and reforming virtue the 
least chance of success. Starting in 1790 with a 
white population of less than thirty thousand — grow- 
ing steadily for forty years, till that population had 
multiplied six-fold — taking into itself, from that time 
on, such multitudes of emigrants from all parts of 
the earth that the dictionaries of the languages 
spoken in its streets would make a library — all forms 
of luxury coming with wealth, and all means and 
facilities for every vice — the primary elections being 
always the seed-bed out of which springs its choice 
of rulers, with the influence which it sends to the 
public councils — its citizens so absorbed in their pur- 
suits that oftentimes, for years together, large num- 
bers of them have left its affairs in hands the most 
of all unsuited to so supreme and delicate a trust — 
it might well have been expected that while its docks 
were echoing with a commerce which encompassed 
the globe, while its streets were thronged with the 
eminent and the gay from all parts of the land, 
while its homes had in them uncounted thousands of 
noble men and cultured women, while its stately 
squares swept out year by year across new spaces, 
while it founded great institutions of beneficence, and 
shot new spires upward toward heaven, and turned 
the rocky waste to a pleasure-ground famous in the 
earth, its government would decay, and its reckless- 
ness of moral ideas, if not as well of political prin- 
ciples, would become apparent. 
62 



This City an Illustration. 

Men have prophesied this, from the outset till now. 
The fear of it began with the first great advance of 
the wealth, population, and fame of the city ; and 
there have not been wanting facts in its history 
which served to renew, if not to justify, the fear. 

But when the War of 1 86 1 broke on the land, and 
shadowed every home within it, this city, — which 
had voted by immense majorities against the existing 
administration, and which was linked by unnumbered 
ties with the vast communities then rushing to as- 
sail it, — flung out its banners from window and spire, 
from City Hall and newspaper office, and poured 
its wealth and life into the service of sustaining- the 
Government, with a swiftness and a vehement 
energy that were never surpassed. When, after- 
ward, greedy and treacherous men, capable and 
shrewd, deceiving the unwary, hiring the skillful, 
and moulding the very law to their uses, had con- 
centrated in their hands the government of the city, 
and had bound it in seemingly invincible chains, 
while they plundered its treasury, — It rose upon 
them, when advised of the facts, as Samson rose 
upon the Philistines ; and the two new cords that 
were upon his hands no more suddenly became as 
flax that was burnt than did those manacles Imposed 
upon the city by the craft of the Ring. 

Its leaders of opinion to-day are the men — like 
him who presides in our assembly — whom virtue ex- 
alts, and character crowns. It rejoices in a Chief 

63 



Oration at Nezv Yo7'k. 

Magistrate as upright and intrepid, in a virtuous 
cause, as any of those whom he succeeds. It is 
part of a State whose present position, in laws, and 
officers, and the spirit of its people, does no discredit 
to the noblest of its memories. And from these 
heights between the rivers, looking over the land, 
looking out on the earth to which its daily embassies 
go, it sees nowhere beneath the sun a city more 
ample in its moral securities, a city more dear to 
those who possess it, a city more splendid in promise 
and in hope. 

What is true of the city is true, in effect, of all the 
land. Two things, at least, have been established 
by our national history, the impression of which the 
world will not lose. The one is, that institutions like 
ours, when sustained by a prevalent moral life 
throughout the nation, are naturally permanent, The 
other is, that they tend to peaceful relations with 
other states. They do this in fulfillment of an or- 
ganic tendency, and not through any accident of 
location. The same tendency will inhere in them, 
wheresoever established. 

In this aee of the world, and in all the states which 
Christianity quickens, the allowance of free move- 
ment to the popular mind is essential to the stability 
of public institutions. There may be restraint enough 
to guide, and keep such movement from premature 
exhibition. But there cannot be force enough used 

to resist it, and to reverse its gathering current. If 
64 



Progress in Europe. 

there is, the government is swiftly overthrown, as in 
France so often, or is left on one side, as Austria 
has been by the advancing German people ; like the 
castle of Heidelberg, at once palace and fortress, 
high-placed and superb, but only the stateliest ruin 
in Europe, while the rail-train thunders through the 
tunnel beneath it, and the Neckar sings along its 
near channel as if tower and tournament never had 
been. Revolution, transformation, organic change, 
have thus all the time for this hundred years been 
proceeding in Europe ; sometimes silent, but oftener 
amid thunders of stricken fields ; sometimes pacific, 
but oftener with garments rolled in blood. 

In England the progress has been peaceful, the 
popular demands being ratified as law whenever the 
need became apparent. It has been vast, as well as 
peaceful ; in the extension of suffrage, in the ever- 
increasing power of the Commons, in popular educa- 
tion. Chatham himself would hardly know his own 
England if he should return to it. The Throne con- 
tinues, illustrated by the virtues of her who fills it ; 
and the ancient forms still obtain in Parliament. But 
it could not have occurred to him, or to Burke, that 
a century after the ministry of Grenville the embarka- 
tion of the Pilgrims would be one of the prominent 
historical pictures on the panels of the lobby of the 
House of Lords, or that the name of Oliver Crom- 
well, and of Bradshaw, President of the High Court 

of Justice, would be cut in the stone in Westminster 

.65 



Oration at New York. 

Abbey, over the places in which they were buried, 
and whence their decaying bodies were dragged to 
the gibbet and the ditch. England is now, as has 
been well said, " an aristocratic Republic, with a 
permanent Executive." Its only perils lie in the fact 
of that aristocracy, which, however, is flexible enough 
to endure, of that permanence in the Executive, which 
would hardly outlive one vicious Prince. 

What changes have taken place in France, I need 
not remind you, nor how uncertain is still its future. 
You know how the swift untiring wheels, of advance 
or reaction, have rolled this way and that, in Italy, 
and in Spain ; how Germany has had to be recon- 
structed ; how Hungary has had to fight and suffer 
for that just place in the Austrian councils which 
only imperial defeat surrendered. You know how 
precarious the equilibrium now is, in many states, 
between popular rights and princely prerogative ; 
what armies are maintained, to fortify governments ; 
what fear of sudden and violent change, like an ava- 
lanche tumbling at the touch of a foot, perplexes na- 
tions. The records of change make the history of 
Europe. The expectation of change is almost as 
wide as the continent itself 

Meantime, how permanent has been this Republic, 
which seemed at the outset to foreign spectators a 
mere sudden insurrection, a mere organized riot! Its 
organic law, adopted after exciting debate, but arous- 
ing no battle and enforced by no army, has been in- 

66 



Triumph of the Republic. 

terpreted, and peacefully administered, with one great 
exception, from the beginning. It has once been as- 
sailed, with passion and skill, with splendid daring and 
unbounded self-sacrifice, by those who sought a sec- 
tional advantage through its destruction. No mon- 
archy of the world could have withstood that assault 
It seemed as if the fatal Apocalypse had come, to 
drench the land with plague and blood, and wrap it in 
a fiery gloom. The Republic, 

— ^ pouring, like the tide into a breach, 
With ample and brim fulness of its force, 

subdued the rebellion, emancipated the race which 
had been in subjection, restored the dominion of the 
old Constitution, amended its provisions in the con- 
trary direction from that which had been so fiercely 
sought, gave it guaranties of endurance while the 
continent lasts, and made its ensigns more eminent 
than ever in the regions from which they had been 
expelled. The very portions of the people which 
then sought its overthrow are now again its applaud- 
ing adherents, — the great and constant reconciling 
force, the tranquillizing Irenarch, being the freedom 
which it leaves in their hands. 

It has kept its place, this Republic of ours, in spite 
of the rapid expansion of the nation over territory 
so wide that the scanty strip of the original states is 
only as a fringe on its immense mantle. It has kept 

6? 



Oration at Nezv York. 

its place, while vehement debates, involving the pro- 
foundest ethical principles, have stirred to its depths 
the whole public mind. It has kept its place, while 
the tribes of mankind have been pouring upon it, 
seekinof the shelter and freedom which it ofave. It 
saw an illustrious President murdered, by the bullet 
of an assassin. It saw his place occupied as quietly 
by another as if nothing unforeseen or alarming had 
occurred. It saw prodigious armies assembled, for 
its defence. It saw those armies, at the end of the 
war, marching in swift and long procession up the 
streets of the Capital, and then dispersing into their 
former peaceful citizenship, as if they had had no arms 
in their hands. The General before whose skill and 
will those armies had been shot upon the forces which 
opposed them, and whose word had been their mili- 
tary law, remained for three years an appointed offi- 
cer of the government he had saved. Elected then 
to be the head of that government, and again re-elect- 
ed by the ballots of his countrymen, in a few months 
more he will have retired, to be thenceforth a citizen 
like the rest, eligible to office, and entitled to vote, 
but with no thought of any prerogative descending to 
him, or to his children, from his great service and 
military fame. The Republic, whose triumphing ar- 
mies he led, will remember his name, and be grateful 
for his work ; but neither to him, nor to any one else, 
will it ever give sovereignty over itself 

From the Lakes to the Gulf its will is the law, its 

68 



Perinane7tce of the RepiLblic. 

dominion is complete. Its centripetal and centrifugal 
forces are balanced, almost as in the astronomy of the 
heavens. Decentralizing authority, it puts his own 
part of it into the hand of every citizen. Giving free 
scope to private enterprise, allowing not only, but ac- 
cepting and encouraging, each movement of the pub- 
lic reason which is its only terrestrial rule, there is no 
threat, in all its sky, of division or downfall. It can- 
not be successfully assailed from within. It never 
will be assailed from without, with a blow at its Hfe, 
while other nations continue sane. 

It has been sometimes compared to a pyramid, 
broad-based and secure, not liable to overthrow as is 
obelisk or column, by storm or age. The compari- 
son is just, but it is not sufficient. It should rather 
be compared to one of the permanent features of na- 
ture, and not to any artificial construction : — to the 
river, which flows, like our own Hudson, along the 
courses that nature opens, forever in motion, but for- 
ever the same ; to the lake, which lies on common 
days level and bright in placid stillness, while It gathers 
its fullness from many lands, and lifts its waves in 
stormy strength when winds assail it ; to the mountain, 
which is shaped by no formula of art, and which only 
rarely, in some supreme sun-burst, flushes with color, 
but whose roots the very earthquake cannot shake, 
and on whose brow the s'torms fall hurtless, while 
under its shelter the cottage nestles, and up its sides 

the gardens climb. 

69 



Oration at New York. 
So stands the Republic : 

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock. 
As broad and general as the casing air. 

Our government has been permanent, as establish- 
ed upon the old Declaration, and steadily sustained 
by the undecaying and moulding life in the soul of 
the Nation. It has been peaceful, also, for the most 
part, in scheme and in spirit ; and has shown at no 
time such an appetite for war as has been familiar, 
within the century, in many lands. 

This may be denied, by foreign critics ; or at any 
rate be explained, if the fact be admitted, by our iso- 
lation from other states, by our occupation in peace- 
ful labors, which have left no room for martial enter- 
prise, perhaps by an alleged want in us of that chiv- 
alric and high-pitched spirit which is gladdened by 
danger and which welcomes the fray. I do not think 
the explanation sufficient, the analysis just. 

This people was trained to military effort, from its 
beginning. It had in rt the blood of Saxon and Nor- 
man, neither of whom was afraid of war ; the very 
same blood which a few years after was poured out 
like water at Marston Moor, and Naseby, and Dun- 
bar. Ardor and fortitude were added to its spirit by 
those whose fathers had followed Coligni, by the 
children of those whom Alva and Parma could not 
conquer, or whom Gustavus had inspired with his 
intense and paramount will. With savages in the 

"VKOods, and the gray wolf prowling around its cabins, 
70 



Martial Spirit of the People. 

the hand of this people was from the first as famihar 
with the gun-stock as with mattock or plough ; and 
it spent more time, in proportic.i to its leisure, it spent 
more life, in proportion to its numbers, from 1607 to 
1776, in protecting itself against violent assault than 
was spent by France, the most martial of kingdoms, 
on all the bloody fields of Europe. 

Then came the Revolution, with its years of war, 
and its crowning success, to intensify, and almost to 
consecrate this spirit, and to give it distribution; 
while, from that time, the nation has been taking into 
its substance abounding elements from all the fighting 
peoples of the earth. The Irishman, who is never 
so entirely himself as when the battle-storm hurtles 
around him; the Frenchman, who says "After you. 
Gentlemen," before the infernal fire of Fontenoy ; 
the German, whose irresistible tread the world lately 
heard at Sadowa and Sedan, — these have been en- 
tering, representatives of two of them entering by 
millions, into the Republic. If any nation, therefore, 
should have a fierce and martial temper, this is the 
one. If any people should keep its peaceful neigh- 
bors in fear, lest its aggression should smite their 
homes, it is a people born, and trained, and replen- 
ished like this, admitting no rule but its own will, and 
conscious of a strenorth whose annual increase makes 
arithmetic pant. 

What has been the fact? Lay out of sight that 

late civil war which could not be averted, when once 

71 



Oration at New York. 

it had been threatened, except by the sacrifice of the 
government itself, and a wholly unparalleled public 
suicide, and how much of war with foreign powers 
has the century seen ? There has been a frequent 
crackle of musketry along the frontiers, as Indian 
tribes, which refused to be civilized, have slowly and 
fiercely retreated toward the West. There was one 
war declared against Tripoli, in 1801, when the Re- 
public took by the throat the African pirates to whom 
Europe paid tribute, and when the gallantry of Preble 
and Decatur gave early distinction to our navy. 
There was a war declared against England, in 18 12, 
when our seamen had been taken from under our 
flag, from the decks indeed of our national ships, and 
our commerce had been practically swept from the 
seas. There was a war affirmed already to exist in 
Mexico, in 1846, entered into by surprise, never for- 
mally declared, against which the moral sentiment 
of the nation rose widely in revolt, but which in its 
result added largely to our territory, opened to us 
Californian treasures, and WTOte the names of Buena 
Vista and Monterey on our short annals. 

That has been our military history ; and if a Peo- 
ple, as powerful and as proud, has anywhere been 
more peaceable also, in the last hundred years, the 
strictest research fails to find it. Smartino- with the 
injury done us by England during the crisis of our 
national peril, in spite of the remonstrances presented 

throuo^h that distinoruished citizen who should have 

72 



A Pacific Te7itper natural to the Reptiblic. 

been your orator to-day, — while hostile taunts had 
incensed our people, while burning ships had exas- 
perated commerce, and while what looked like artful 
evasions had made statesmen indignant, — with a half- 
million men who had hardly yet laid down their arms, 
with a navy never before so vast, or so fitted for 
service, — when a war with England would have had 
the force of passion behind it, and would at any rate 
have shown to the world that the nation respects 
its starry flag, and means to have it secure on the 
seas, — we referred all differences to arbitration, 
appointed commissioners, tried the cause at Geneva, 
with advocates, not with armies, and got a prompt 
and ample verdict. If Canada now lay next to York- 
shire it would not be safer from armed incursion than 
it is when divided by only a custom-house from all 
the strength of this Republic. 

The fact is apparent, and the reason not less so. 
A monarchy, just as it is despotic, finds incitement 
to war ; for pre-occupation of the popular mind ; to 
gratify nobles, officers, the army ; for historic renown. 
An intelligent Republic hates war, and shuns it. It 
counts standing armies a curse only second to an 
annual pestilence. It wants no glory but from 
growth. It delights itself in arts of peace, seeks 
social enjoyment and increase of possessions, and 
feels instinctively that, like Israel of old, " its strength 
is to sit still." It cannot bear to miss the husbandman 
from the fields, the citizen from the town, the house- 

73 



Oration at New York. 

father from the home, the worshipper from the church. 
To change or shape other people's institutions is no 
part of its business. To force them to accept its 
scheme of government would simply contradict and 
nullify its charter. Except, then, when it is startled into 
passion by the cry of a suffering under oppression 
which stirs its pulses into tumult, or when it is 
assailed in its own rights, citizens, property, it will 
not go to war ; nor even then, if diplomacy can find 
a remedy for the wrong. " Millions for defence," 
said Cotesworth Pinckney to the French Directory, 
when Talleyrand in their name had threatened him 
with war, "but not a cent for tribute." He might 
have added, " and not a dollar for aggressive strife." 
It will never be safe to insult such a nation, or 
to outrage its citizens ; 'for the reddest blood is in its 
veins, and some Captain Ingraham may always 
appear, to lay his little sloop of war along-side the 
offending frigate, with shotted guns, and a per- 
emptory summons. There is a way to make powder 
inexplosive ; but, treat it chemically how you will, 
the dynamite will not stand many blows of the ham- 
mer. The detonating tendency is too permanent in 
it. But if left to itself, such a People will be peaceful, 
as ours has been. It will foster peace among the 
nations. It will tend to dissolve great permanent 
armaments, as the light conquers ice, and summer 
sunshine breaks the glacier which a hundred trip- 
hammers could only scar. The longer it continues, 

74 



The Day to be Remembered. 

the more widely and effectively its influence spreads, 
the more will its benign example hasten the day, so 
long foretold, so surely coming, when 

The war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled. 
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World, 

Mr. President: Fellow-Citizens: — To an extent 
too great for your patience, but with a rapid incom- 
pleteness that is only too evident as we match it with 
the theme, I have outlined before you some of the 
reasons why we have right to commemorate the day 
whose hundredth anniversary has brought us to- 
gether, and why the paper then adopted has interest 
and importance not only for us, but for all the ad- 
vancinof sons of men. Thank God that he who 
framed the Declaration, and he who was its foremost 
champion, both lived to see the nation they had 
shaped growing to greatness, and to die together, 
in that marvelous coincidence, on its semi-centennial ! 
The fifty years which have passed since then have 
only still further honored their work. Mr. Adams 
was mistaken in the day which he named as the one 
to be most fondly remembered. It was not that on 
which Independence of the empire of Great Britain 
was formally resolved. It was that on which the 
reasons were given which justified the act, and 
the principles were announced which made it of 
secular significance to mankind. But he would have 
been absolutely right in saying of the fourth day 



Oration at New York. 

what he did say of the second : it " will be the most 
remarkable epoch in the history of America ; to be 
celebrated by succeeding generations as the great 
anniversary festival, commemorated as the day of de- 
liverance, by solemn acts of devotion to Almighty 
God, from one end of the continent to the other." 
(^ It will not be forgotten, in the land or in the earth, 
until the stars have fallen from their poise ; or until 
our vivid morning-star of Republican liberty, not 
losing its lustre, has seen its special brightness fade 
in the ampler effulgence of a freedom universal ! 

C But while we rejoice in that which is past, and 
gladly recognize the vast organific mystery of life 
which was in the Declaration, the plans of Providence 
which slowly and silently, but with ceaseless progres- 
sion, had led the way to it, the immense and enduring 
results of good which from it have flowed, let us not 
forget the duty which always equals privilege, and 
that of peoples, as well as of persons, to whomsoever 
much is given, shall only therefore the more be 
required. Let us consecrate ourselves, each one of 
us, here, to the further duties which wait to be 
fulfilled, to the work which shall consummate the 
great work of the Fathers ! 

" From scanty soils come richest grapes, and on 
severe and rocky slopes the trees are often of tough- 
est fibre. The wines of Riidesheim and Johannis- 
berg cannot be grown in the fatness of gardens, and 

the cedars of Lebanon disdain the levels of marsh 

76 



The Duty of America^i Citizens. 

and meadow. So a heroism is sometimes native to 
penury which luxury enervates, and the great reso- 
lution which sprang up in the blast, and blossomed 
under inclement skies, may lose its shapely and stead- 
fast strength when the air is all of summer softness. 
In exuberant resources is to be the comine American 
peril ; in a swiftly increasing luxury of life. The old 
humility, hardihood, patience, are too likely to be lost 
w^hen material success again opens, as it will, all 
avenues to wealth, and when its brilliant prizes 
solicit, as again they will, the national spirit. 

Be it ours to endeavor that that temper of the 
Fathers which was nobler than their work shall live 
in the children, and exalt to its tone their coming 
career ; that political intelligence, patriotic devotion, 
a reverent spirit toward Him who is above, an exult- 
ing expectation of the future of the World, and a 
sense of our relation to it, shall be, as of old, essential 
forces in our public life ; that education and religion 
keep step all the time with the Nation's advance, and 
the School and the Church be always at home wher- 
ever its flag shakes out its folds. In a spirit worthy 
the memories of the Past let us set ourselves to ac- 
complish the tasks which, in the sphere of national 
politics, still await completion. We burn the sun- 
shine of other years, when we ignite the wood or 
coal upon our hearths. We enter a privilege which 
ages have secured, in our daily enjoyment of polit- 
ical freedom. While the kindling glow irradiates our 

77 



Oration at New York. 

homes, let it shed its lustre on our spirit, and quicken 
it for its further work. 

Let us fight against the tendency of educated 
men to reserve themselves from politics, remem- 
bering that no other form of human activity is so grand 
or effective as that which affects, first the character, 
and then the revelation of character in the govern- 
ment, of a great and free People. Let us make relig- 
ious dissension here, as a force in politics, as absurd 
as witchcraft.* Let party names be nothing to us, in 
comparison with that costly and proud inheritance of 
liberty and of law, which parties exist to conserve 
and enlarge, which any party will have here to main- 
tain if it would not be buried, at the next cross-roads, 
with a stake through its breast. Let us seek the 
unity of all sections of the Republic, through the 
prevalence in all of mutual respect, through the assur- 
ance in all of local freedom, through the mastery in 
all of that supreme spirit which flashed from the lips 
of Patrick Henry, when he said, in the first Continen- 
tal Congress, " I am not a Virginian, but an American." 
Let us take care that labor maintains its ancient place 

* Cromwell is sometimes considered a bigot. His rule on this sub- 
ject is therefore the more Worthy of record : " Sir, the State, in choos- 
ing mentosen^e it, takes no notice of their opinions ; if they be willing 
faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. * * Take heed of being sharp, or 
too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object 
little, but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning 
matters of religion. If there be any other offence to be charged upon 
him, that must, in a judicial way, receive determination." — Letter to 
Major-General Crawford, roth March, 1643; 
73 



Our Relation to Past, and Ftiture. 

of privileg-e and honor, and that industry has no fet- 
ters imposed, of legal restraint or of social discredit, 
to hinder its work or to lessen its waee. Let us 

o 

turn, and overturn, in public discussion, in political 
change, till we secure a Civil Service, honorable, in- 
telligent, and worthy of the land, in which capable 
integrity ,*not partisan zeal, shall be the condition of 
each public trust ; and let us resolve that wh ateve r it- 
may cost, of labor and of patience, of sharp«^i2Bfe- 
my and of general sacrifice, it shall come to pass^that 
wherever American labor toils, wherever American 
enterprise plans, wherever American commerce reach- 
es, thither again shall go as of old the country's coin 
— the American Eagle, with the encircling stars and 
golden plumes ! 

In a word, Fellow-Citizens, the moral life of the na- 
tion being ever renewed, all advancement and timely 
reform will come as comes the bourgeoning of the 
tree from the secret force which fills its veins. Let us 
each of us live, then, in the blessing and the duty of 
our great citizenship, as those who are conscious of 
unreckoned indebtedness to a heroic and prescient 
Past : — the grand and solemn lineage of whose free- 
dom runs back beyond Bunker Hill or the Mayflow- 
er, runs back beyond muniments and memories of 
men, and has the majesty of far centuries on it ! Let 
us live as those for whom God hid a continent from 
the world, till He could open all its scope to the free- 
dom and faith of gathered peoples, from many lands, 

79 



Oration at New York. 

to be a nation to His honor and praise ! Let us live 
as those to whom He commits the magnificent trust 
of blessing peoples many and far, by the truths which 
He has made our life, and by the history which He 
helps us to accomplish. 

Such relation to a Past ennobles this transient and 
vanishing life. Such a power of influence on the dis- 
tant and the Future, is the supremest terrestrial privi- 
lege. It is ours, if we will, in the mystery of that 
spirit which has an immortal and a ubiquitous life. 
With the swifter instruments now in our hands, with 
the land compacted into one immense embracing 
home, with the world opened to the interchange of 
thought, and thrilling with the hopes that now ani- 
mate its life, each American citizen has superb op- 
portunity to make his influence felt afar, and felt for 
long ! 

Let us not be unmindful of this ultimate and in- 
spiring lesson of the hour ! By all the memories of 
the Past, by all the impulse of the Present, by the 
noblest instincts of our own souls, by the touch of 
His sovereign Spirit upon us, God make us faithful 
to the work, and to Him ! that so not only this city 
may abide, in long and bright tranquillity of peace, 
when our eyes have shut forever on street, and spire, 
and populous square ; that so the land, in all its fu- 
ture, may reflect an influence from this anniversary ; 
and that, when another century has passed, the sun 

which then ascends the heavens may look on a world 

80 



The Nation at the Next Centermial. 

advanced and illumined beyond our thought, and here 
may behold the same great Nation, born of struggle, 
baptized into liberty, and in its second terrific trial 
purchased by blood, then expanded and multiplied 
till all the land blooms at its touch, and still one in its 
life, because still pacific. Christian, free ! 

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